Hannibal Cash Esq.

ALIVE DAY: YEAR FOUR

The injured soldiers were in a group of Humvees returning from a mission April 7 2005 when the attack occurred.

Sage rushed to the Humvee after a car bomber slammed into the truck at high speed. The explosion and fire pinned Spc. Timothy Boots under the dashboard, and severely injured Staff Sgt. Jason Leisey and Spc. Kevin Claycomb.

via

if you’re unfamiliar with the term “Alive Day” I recommend highly the HBO Documentary that James Gandolfini did shorty after my time at Walter Reed.

Long story short, it’s a horrible day in your life that you take back as a sortof semi-birthday.  It’s the day you made it.

It seems especially relevant this year with the debate over the new policy for our returning dead.  I agree that it’s best left to the families to decide the amount of coverage, but personally, I want them to cover every single one.

At that point, I believe that they belong to all of us, as a nation.  They have died for us in a much more real way than any carpenter’s son who lived two millenia ago.  We should all watch.  We should all give homage.  They have kept a covenant with us that few can comprehend.  They should not be exploited for anyone’s political gain, but god damn it we must bear witness.

——————

Four years.

It’s a long fucking time.  It seems so long ago to me, but sometimes it seems so current.  Sometimes it will strike me again that it’s permanent.  That no matter how long I last I will never wake up with a right foot again.

I can still wiggle the toes on it.  At least in my mind.  It’s a weird pins-and-needles feeling, but it’s better than nothing.

I’m truly one of the lucky ones.  If I had suffered the same injuries during the invasion, I probably would have lost my knee as well.  That’s how fast battlefield medicine advances.  When I first got to Walter Reed the orthopedics ward was full, so they had to slip me in next door, in neuroscience.

That’s when I first saw just how god damn lucky I was.  I could still feed myself.  Granted it was through a straw at first, but that only lasted a month.

I still had my smarts.  I still had my cunning.

Like Tom Waits says: I don’t need no makeup.  I got real scars.

The jagged zipper that runs from my dick to my sternum where they took my fucking spleen.

The cocksucker of a drug-resistant strain of acinetobacter.

6 vertebrae.

9 ribs.

3 toes and 4 metatarsals in the existing foot.

broken jaw.

major concussion.

Sometimes I fear the bravado survival’s given me.  If a truck full of TNT couldn’t kill me, what the fuck are you gonna do?

I also feel incredibly humbled to have trod the lands where this all began.  Everything in all of human history started between those two rivers.  I am less than a speck in the wind in that grand scheme.

I’m humbled to have made it.  I was no better than any of the sons or daughters, fathers and mothers, who didn’t.  We must forever be grateful that such men and women existed.

This day will always be the first day of the rest of my life.