The Revival Pt. 16: Themes For Oral History

Theme #1: A Soldier’s Fear

"I was afraid of not being able to come home for any reason. And then every time I did something I didn’t know if it was gonna be the last time.”

“I feel I did a service. ‘Cause when I initially signed up it was in ’99 and the world was a totally different place. So, I never expected any of this to happen.”

“We were three and half hours away by helicopter. We were on our…we were off the grid. We only had contact with the main base.”

“Insurgents from Africa would take that road to go join the fight. We had a checkpoint that’s where we would go for our three weeks. We had a checkpoint in the road and we would have to search their vehicles and make sure they had proper paperwork and make sure that, you know whatever reason they were going for where ever they said they were going made sense.”

“Yeah, sometimes we would catch them carrying weapons, well that’s if they stopped.”

What did you do if they didn’t stop?     

“You gotta do, well mmmm…next question.”

“I had disentary and I almost died. I believe I had an Italian doctor who really didn’t know English, so…the nurse who was on duty, he was army, so he was uhhh American. Right before I was gonna leave there was a Special Forces doctor to come check me out. I was sick for four days and I was kinda in and out of it. I had constant IVs because I couldn’t keep any kinda fluid in.  I found out later when I came home after looking at my paperwork that they were getting ready to airlift me outta there because my vital signs were so low and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. And, if they’re gonna airlift you outta there there’s a major problem.”

Theme #2: Letters to a Soldier

“We would get letters. They would come once or twice, I’m sorry, to drop off like supplies and stuff to us. So, we were able to give them letters and they were able to give us ya know the letter s that came in.”

“It was interesting it was like you didn’t care what they wrote. You just wanted to hear something from home. When I didn’t get a letter it was like, it broke your heart. Now, you had to wait a couple more weeks till you could talk to your family or your friends.”

Theme #3: A Soldier’s Wish List

What was another thing you missed from home?

“Mc Donald’s.”

“Yeah we had TV, but we only had two or three English speaking channels. Watching the football games, like if you wanted to watch ‘em live you would have to stay up till four o clock in the morening. Ummm..or you could watch them the next at a regular time, but it was already taped and if you called him you already found the scores out.”

 

Theme #4: Ground Zero and The Aftermath


“I just remember how patriotic everyone was and everyone was all about America. And so, ya know we were a very visual force ‘cause we were made to be. So, we would be there with ya know a Hum-V with a big machine gun on top of it and there would be four or five of us surrounding it and ya know people would always come up to us, and talk to us. I just remember New Year’s Eve especially, we were there, and everyone was stopping and bringing all sorts of food and booze.” (Picture a big smile while saying the word booze!)