The night they brought Captain Waskow down.

[Brisketexan 105678]

So a little something to read this memorial day, while you're letting the smoker do its work on those ribs; it's about a fellow Texan, and seems only fitting. 

If you’ve ever walked among the rows of stones at Arlington, you’ve felt the magnitude of war’s bloody reaping. That’s one story. But the other story is the one beneath each stone. Each and every war death is personal. To families, to friends, to comrades. Every lost life makes the world poorer. Ernie Pyle knew that keenly when he wrote this note. How much better of a place would this earth be if Captain Waskow had walked down that mountain, instead of being carried down, draped across a mule? I read this piece once for a prose-reading competition in high school; I didn’t even place. I think it was because I simply read it, and even with my trained inflection, I was reciting it. I wasn’t TELLING it, because I didn’t FEEL it. I didn’t – and couldn’t, at age 16 – understand what Ernie Pyle had really written. It is a story of love, as much as Romeo and Juliet was, and even with the same tragic end. Memorial Day is about what we have lost – what we ALL have lost. I grew up in a nation without a Captain Waskow. While we are richer, and safer, for his sacrifice, we are also poorer for his loss.

Quote

“In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas. . . . .I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked. . . . The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.”

Read the rest of Ernie Pyle’s beautiful piece, and you too can hear what they had to say. Hearing the voices of the mourners, of the comrades – it seems we owe them that much.

http://mediaschool.indiana.edu/erniepyle/1944/01/10/the-death-of-captain-waskow/

[Not that Bob 739]

"God damn it."