Soldiers Don't Cry

It must have been the rain

It must have been the rain. Because soldiers don’t cry.

Especially Rangers.

I was no Ranger. I was a regular Army Specialist-4, a photojournalist, and I’d been covering the 1/75 Ranger battalion for a year. The Rangers were disinterested at first. I was just another REMF — Rear Echelon…well, you can guess the rest — without a rucksack and carrying cameras instead of a rifle. But after months of me running backwards photographing their exercises with a metric crap ton of Pentax gear in a Domke bag hanging from one shoulder, they’d decided I was OK.

High praise from a Ranger.

Ranger sniper, Ft. Stewart, GA, 1984 Feola.Foto

But no training this day. No running. We were standing the missing man formation.

The previous fall the 1/75 Rangers had led the invasion of Grenada. It had been a bit of a goat rope — pretty much everything military is at least a bit of a goat rope. Legend among the Rangers had it that a Ranger captain, frustrated by the failure of Army radios to talk to Navy air support, had broken into a house and called the Pentagon collect, eventually reaching the aircraft carrier. No battle plan survives enemy contact, but as military operations go, it had gone well.

But even military operations that go well have a bloody cost, and we were here in a Georgia winter rain to pay. The Rangers had tangled with a Cuban light armor unit, and defeated them soundly. The Cubans suffered 24 killed, 59 wounded, and 605 captured. No surprise, really. The Rangers are the finest light infantry in the world.

As the bugler blew Taps, the Rangers stood at attention in a formation with 8 holes in it. Eight places filled with a pair of boots, a rifle and a helmet. Eight places missing a Ranger, who gave all on that field in Grenada.

A monument was dedicated, and important things were said by important people. We heard none of that. All we heard was a bugler playing Taps, and the incessant, outraged wailing of a small baby born after the invasion. She was fussy because it was cold, and it was wet, and it was miserable.

And because she was too young to understand that one pair of empty boots had belonged to her father.

When I got back to the newsroom my sergeant asked me why I had not taken my cameras out of the bag.

It was RAINING, I said.

He let it go. He was a soldier, too.

Now I am grown old. And that baby must be a woman older than her father ever was. On this Memorial Day, I ask that you remember her, and him, all the thousands and thousands of others who will always be young, and soldiers, because they gave all on a battlefield for our country.

Sentinel, The National Training Center, Ft. Irwin, CA 1983