Memorial Day draws to a close and my thoughts go to the only member of my family who has served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Captain Adam P. Snyder. He is my second cousin, the son of my mother's first cousin. He's the grandson of a World War II vet (himself one of three brothers who served in The Big One; one of the others served as a law clerk in the Nuremberg trials). He is a man I never got to meet face to face and only got to know through his emails and through stories from his mother.
Adam died of burn wounds sustained after an IED attack while on patrol near Bayji, in a military hospital in Mosul.
I've talked about it only briefly on Kos, and never in my own diary, in the past. But today, my thoughts have been about him and so I feel like talking about it.
Adam's passing was marked by other diarists, here and here, and I commented briefly on the latter diary. The former contains what truly was his last email to the family - I received it just days before we got the news.
At the time I read it I remember being surprised at Adam's candor about his opinion of the quality of Washington leadership in managing this war. Being a true officer, he didn't call out the President directly (it would be insubordination to do so, I believe) but he made it clear his opinion. I also remembered taking exception (but not voicing it) that he thought a Presidential qualification was military service, but beyond that I was struck by his prognosis of the Iraq war, that we were skilled at killing enemies and keeping imported ones out but utterly failing to construct a functional Iraqi government.
Adam, you see, was fairly conservative and from a conservative family. My branch of the family, filled with liberal non-Christians, was the exception. Adam's was the rule. And he exemplified the best of that side. He had a strong faith, but lived it rather than preaching it. He was conservative, but not partisan. He cared about his country and served it, rather than paying lip service. And that came through in his last message to us.
My mother had gotten us to buy blankets and send them to him to distribute to Iraqi children. It's cold in the Iraqi winter and the power's unreliable so the blankets are really a necessity. We'd been getting communications - emails, etc. - from him through both his tours. I so wanted to sit down with him one day and hear his stories of the war. So much of the truth of Iraq is polluted by partisan filters and agendas and to hear it unvarnished from an officer who'd served two tours. That'd be something special. And to finally get to meet him face to face, this man I'd come to admire so much. This man who represented the best of the Paulson line. (Paulson, his middle name, and both our mothers' maiden names.) God, it sucks so bad I'll never get that chance.
The morning of Dec. 5, 2007 I got an email at work from my mother, forwarded from his mother, that Adam had been in an IED attack, that he had been severely burned over 60% of his body. (I later learned that two of his men, Sgt. Eric Hernandez and Pvt. DeWayne White, were killed in the same attack.) The road to recovery promised to be long and difficult.
A lot of things went through my head at the time - I knew Adam wanted to be an actor and wounds of that degree would probably make that impossible. I thought about his mother and how sweet and wonderful she'd been every time I'd seen her and how I wish she could be comforted. I thought about his little brother Evan, only a few months older than my first-born son, and how could he handle this. I thought about the terrible pain Adam must have suffered, must be suffering, from his wounds, and I had to think of something else because I couldn't bear to think about it. Then I remembered what might have been an old wives' tale but it went something like -- the odds of surviving severe burns go something like adding the percentage of body burned to the age of the victim and that's the odds of the wounds being fatal. For Adam that was just south of 90%. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I braced for what I knew was inevitable.
It took less than an hour for Mom to call with the news -- Adam's mom had called her.
IGTNT. We use it here as a shorthand - "I got the news today (oh boy)." Someone's mother just got told her son isn't coming home. Someone's family will never be able to give their heroes a welcoming hug when they arrive home safe. IGTNT. That little shorthand doesn't express the gut-wrenching horror, the terrible grief, of getting that news.
I stopped getting quite so passionate about the war at that point. Perhaps it was selfish of me, but my family had already paid the only price it was going to pay for it. The terrible price, that we hoped we'd never have to pay. The same price thousands of other families have had to pay, yes, but ... it changed things. In ways I can't describe. Like, I used to be angry at the Bush administration for how they manipulated us into this war. But I stopped. I just didn't care about the why any more and I really just wanted the war to be over more than I wanted the Bush administration to be held to account for their deception. I wanted no more families to have to greet a fucking flag-draped coffin more than I cared about recrimination. I didn't blame Bush for Adam's death. I didn't even blame the enemies who planted the IED. I just hated the war. I still hate the war. I just wish we'd never gotten into it and I want it to end.
I think the war stopped being an abstract in my mind. It became an entity to me, that exists independent of Bush, Saddam, al Qaeda, Sunnis, Shia, or anyone else. It was just this beast, a living demon that devoured the lives of men, women and children, and with those lives, all the potential they carried. Disappeared into its gaping maw, never to be seen again.
Maybe it was also because Adam's loss was the first in a year's worth of difficult losses. Two months later, my dear father succumbed to the liver failure he'd been suffering from for the previous eighteen months. Then Adam's grandfather Bev passed. Then Bev's sister Marion passed - and they were the last two of my grandfather's seven siblings, ending the generation that homesteaded our family farm in North Dakota.
Whatever the reason, Adam's death has sat with me. Yesterday was my 38th birthday and while we celebrated I kept thinking about today. Dear friends brought some flowers over to my house where we were hosting a barbecue yesterday and I decided to put them to good use.
So today, we drove up to the Fort Snelling veterans' cemetery. I'd never been - the place is huge (though not nearly as huge as Arlington). My kids, my girlfriend and I went to the memorial path where monuments stand to various groups. One happened to be to the 101st Airborne, Adam's division. Adam was interred in Florida, a long way from Minnesota, but this, at least, was an appropriate place. We took the flowers -- a really beautiful bouquet -- and laid them at the foot of the monument.
I don't know. It was such a small gesture, to lay some flowers down at a monument. But I wanted to do something, even something small, to remember Adam, just as hundreds of other families were doing at the cemetery, just as millions remember our fallen heroes today. Maybe it counted for something. I hope so.
To those who read this rambling little diary, thanks. I just wanted to get it out.
Rest in peace, Adam.