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USO Tour - Day 2 - fpw - 11-04-2013
Operation Thriller IV
Day 2
October 25, 2013 - Washington, DC.
Humbled. That’s the word. I go to bed tonight a humbled man.
We spent the afternoon at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. I knew it as the Walter Reed Army Medical Center back in my college days at Georgetown. Since then it has merged with the old Bethesda Naval Hospital and now serves the Air Force as well.
We set up in the cafeteria of Building 62 where the wounded warriors transition from hospital life to real life. This reminded me very much of the Center for the Intrepid at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio that I visited a number of years ago with a clutch of my fellow Macmillan authors to sign and give away copies of our books to the rehabbing soldiers down there.
“Freedom isn’t free.” Like me, you’ve probably heard that phrase often enough to dismiss it as a hoary cliché. Let me tell you, it stops being a cliché when you visit a place like Building 62. These young men and women are survivors, though all have had friends who paid the ultimate price. But many of these survivors have paid within a hair’s breadth of that ultimate.
You stand there, all four of your limbs intact, and converse with them as they calmly tell you how they lost one, two, occasionally more of their own. Because we never hear their names, their injuries become statistics in the public consciousness. But when you do learn their names, and you hear their voices and their stories, see their mechanical limbs, their fire-scarred skin, they’re no longer a number. They’re people – terribly young people – who were sent to war and came back broken.
The USO is on hand to help them heal.
You look around and see this table for one with an empty chair and a single white plate. It’s called a POW/MIA remembrance table, always kept set in the event of the return of a missing comrade. And when you hear that one table is set this way in every base cafeteria all over the world, your throat tightens.
We were all pretty quiet on the van ride back to our Washington hotel.
“USO”… another cliché is to hear those letters and think of the famous Camp Shows. Those morale-boosting events are an important part of the USO, past and present (although nowadays they send a heavy metal band instead of Bob Hope). That’s the public face of USO. What you don’t see are the volunteers who donate their time and often their treasure to lifting the spirits of service men and women all over the world, letting them know they’re not forgotten, and that the folks back home care about them and appreciate what they do.
I didn’t appreciate the extent of the volunteer efforts until tonight at the USO Gala, an annual event to honor the Soldier of the Year from each of the different services. One of the speakers rattled off a few statistics about all the services USO provides, but the one that bowled me over: 27,000 volunteers donated 1.35 million hours of their time to the USO last year.
And I couldn’t help comparing myself to all those thousands of faceless volunteers. What do I do for the folks who put life and limb – quite literally – on the line out there? I spend my days hunched over a keyboard inventing places and scenarios, wandering through worlds that exist only in my head and reporting back on them. Yeah, I know… I hear from soldiers and sailor all the time, telling me how my stories helped pass the time at sea or between deployments. But I’m well paid for what I do. It can’t hold a candle to getting out there and volunteering your time and effort for 1.35 million hours a year.
As I said, I go to bed a humbled man tonight. But one who is happier than ever that he volunteered for Operation Thriller. It’s a measly nine days, but it’s a start.
USO Tour - Day 2 - Peter - 11-04-2013
I wish I had read that before I met you. Oh, don't get me wrong, I was and remain delighted to have met you but I had some similar experiences of my own after the Falklands war. And, yes, humble is a very, very good word in those circumstances.
I would have agreed with you in person.