Boots On The Ground In The Village: Fill & Download for Free

It was one of the worst days of my life. I was coming home for my mother’s funeral. She passed away on December 13, 1983 after a long fight with cancer. I was stationed with the USAF in England. My sister telephoned to let me know. For family in Ohio it was evening, for me it was the middle of the night. I went back to my barracks room and began packing my bag, in the dark, so I wouldn’t wake my roommate.Because of the time difference, it took all day for the Red Cross to get official word to the Air Force and for my emergency leave to be approved. My boss drove me to the train station in the village for the trip down to London - He also gave me $200 because he knew this was an emergency trip and, as a young airman, I hadn’t saved any money for unplanned travel expenses.I flew from Heathrow to Kennedy in NYC and landed about 8:00 pm. I had a connecting flight across town, leaving from LaGuardia to Cleveland at 9:30. My mother’s funeral would be the following morning.When military members travel on emergency leave, they wear their dress uniforms. Being an aircraft technician, my everyday uniform was fatigues and steel-toes boots… but there I was, in the beautiful blue dress uniform I hadn’t worn even a dozen times in three years.I ran, blue uniform skirt and jacket, black high heels, stupid beret, purse, and one small bag, racing past slow people, dodging other traveler’s group hugs… running at top high-heel wearing speed through the airport and when I reached the curb out front, I checked in with the man overseeing the ground transportation area. I had missed the shuttle to LaGuardia by about a minute. He assured me that the shuttle buses came by every 15 minutes and that I could catch the next one. My plane from LaGuardia was leaving in about 1 hour.About 20 minutes (of pacing back and forth to stay warm in an NYC winter) later there still wasn’t a fresh shuttle and I started worrying. I went back to the booth and asked if I’d somehow missed the shuttle. He got on the phone and the look on his face told me everything I needed to know. He told me there was a traffic jam and the shuttle I’d missed was stuck in the jam. Everything between the two airports was locked up tight. There wouldn’t be any shuttles to LaGuardia for hours.I started crying. I couldn’t help it. I’d been awake for about 40 hours at that time. My mother had died. I had about 45 minutes to get across town in order to get home and no way to get there. I must have been a sight standing there in my “blues” weeping. I blubbered out about my mother and the funeral and the plane…The man looked at me and said, “Hold on, Airman. Hold on.”He got on the phone again and, I have no sense of time here because I was a broken mess, a short time later, a golf cart pulled up. The man in the booth bustled me in and said, “We’ll get you home, miss.” I thanked him … not quite sure how that that was going to happen.What I didn’t know was that as the golf cart driver was racing us through the airport, an American Airlines ticket agent at Kennedy was arranging for a plane ticket and checking me in with US Airlines out of LaGuardia.The golf cart pulled up to a door and a man waiting by it ushered me through. There were stairs down to the ground outside where a helicopter was firing up. The man said, “if anyone asks, you’re an airplane part.”“Huh?”“We’re not licensed to haul passengers. You’re an airplane part. Better yet, you were never here. Next stop, LaGuardia.”I hugged him. I asked him to give the guys upstairs a hug for me too.I climbed in the back of the helicopter and buckled in. The pilot lifted off and, on the short flight across NYC, all decorated for Hanukkah and Christmas with twinkling lights and decorated trees in every window of every highrise, I thought about my mother and how she would have loved this flight. I saw those lights I wondered how I would ever get along without her. I cried all the way across town grateful for the giving and generous people of New York City who really pulled out all the stops to take care of one grieving airman on the worst day of her life.We landed at the empty gate next to the plane at LaGuardia and I was sent up the groundcrew staircase where the pilot was holding my flight. A person standing in the telescoping tunnel handed me my plane ticket. It was already 5 minutes past the plane’s scheduled departure time. I knew I’d made everybody late and wasn’t sure if I was prepared for the nasty looks waiting for me.I got on board and no one said anything to me, but a couple of people gave me tiny smiles. The flight attendant gestured to an empty seat in the front row of the coach section. She put my bag and beret in the overhead bin and closed it as I buckled my seatbelt. We were moving away from the gate before she even sat down in her crew jump seat.When we landed in Cleveland and were deplaning, the pilot came out of the cockpit and shook my hand, “Some entrance, Airman. Our condolences upon the loss of your mother” was all he said. As we were walking to ground transportation and baggage claim, I found out from my fellow passengers that the pilot had made an announcement that the plane was waiting for me and would not take off until I arrived. He told them he would appreciate it if they would remember that I was going to my mother’s funeral and asked them to be both patient and kind.The people of New York City took care of me on the very worst day of my life. I will always be indebted to them for that.Thanks to everyone who upvoted and thank you for the warm comments. For those that cried, I hope they were happy tears.Additional note: That wonderful supervisor, who always treated everyone with the utmost respect, encouraged his airmen to strive for excellence, and took the best care of his troops possible, was scheduled to leave England on December 15 (two days after my mother died - the day after he drove me to the train station). He knew he’d probably never get that $200 back.When my assignment in England ended in 1985, I drove across the US to my new assignment in Nevada. I stopped by to visit him in New Mexico where he was stationed and returned his $200. About a year after that, he retired from the Air Force and moved to California.What had been a platonic friendship slowly grew and about a year after I started visiting him in California, he asked me to marry him. I accepted. It might sound crazy but the FIRST time we ever kissed was the night he gave me my engagement ring.We’ve been married for almost 35 years now. David Jungbauer is freaking awesome.

We tried. Stalin was unimpressed.At a meeting of the US, British and Soviet foreign ministers in London in September 1945, Secretary of State James Byrnes thought that dropping unsubtle hints about the atomic bomb would make the USSR more cooperative. At a reception, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov asked Byrnes when he was going to stop sightseeing and get down to business, inquiring if Byrnes "had an atomic bomb in his side pocket." Byrnes riposted, "You don't know southerners, we carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don't cut all this stalling and let us get down to work, I am going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it."The exchange was not the height of diplomatic subtlety, but it showed the limits of diplomatic power that the short lived American nuclear monopoly had. It didn't stop the Cold War from ratcheting up and it didn’t deter Stalin from consolidating his hold on Eastern Europe.So, dear Questioner, you have posited a number of leading questions:Why didn't the Americans push out the Soviets out of Europe after WW2 with the threat of nuclear war?Because Stalin called our bluff. Add in the fact that in the period between the end of World War II and the first Soviet atomic test, the US nuclear stockpile was limited - in the tens of nuclear warheads. Add in the fact the US didn’t have a sure fire delivery system by strategic bomber. Add in the fact that contemporary war plans for a nuclear attack called for more than 200 atomic bombs, and you can see the Bomb was mostly a bluff that Stalin could see through.Why did they [the Americans] just let them casually have their empire?They had boots on the ground in Eastern Europe and we didn’t. Nukes would not have removed all those boots on the ground unless the US were prepared to “destroy the village in order to save it.”Why did they [the Americans] just let them [have] all the time needed to develop their own nuclear weapons?See above. There was no option of a “surgical” attack on the Soviet nuclear program.

There have been a handful of times during my deployments where I’ve openly cried, and many, many times when I should have been crying, but couldn’t.The first time I shed tears was during my first deployment in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, August 22, 2010.A village that was in my platoon’s Area of Operations (AO) was pretty hostile towards us and we got into small firefights every single time we went there. Someone higher up decided we needed to do something about all the contact we were taking from this village so they planned a company mission where our 3 platoons would go into the village and find whoever was harassing us and put an end to it once and for all.The plan was pretty simple: One platoon would move to the top of the mountain behind the village and cut off the Haqqani Network/Taliban fighter’s escape routes, one platoon would stay with the vehicles on the other side of the river and provide covering fire from the mounted .50 cals and MK19s, and my platoon would go door-to-door through the village and kill or capture any insurgents.We knew we were going into a fight before we were close enough to the village to see it. The drive through the mountainous terrain took over an hour to get to the village once we left our COP, and because it was the only road through the mountains, it was obvious where we were headed. We knew that they knew we were coming because about 10 minutes before we arrived at the village we found tons of women and children waiting on the side of the mountain, and we had never seen any women out in public before.As soon as we arrived we set out on our mission. Our blocking platoon went up into a draw to get above the village and my platoon broke off and started to push through the village. We had only been on the objective for maybe 15 minutes when the first shots were fired.My fire team of 3 guys was inside a house and away from the rest of our platoon when everything went to shit. We rushed out of the house and tried to get to where the action was, but we couldn’t find anyone. Everything was happening just above us on a huge “step” that was cut into the mountain. We found a small draw that took us up about 15 meters. I could hear people screaming through the machine gun fire. Once we were on top of the plateau, it was hell. I could see Afghans shooting down from above. Higher up on the mountain, part of the other platoon firing from above them and more of the same platoon firing up from about 5 meters below us. We were maybe 20 meters from the nearest squad, but we couldn’t get to them because of the huge drop. To make things worse, we were on a different radio frequency from that platoon and my platoon wasn’t answering the radio. We could hear my platoon just fine, but they couldn’t hear us (mountains are hell on communications) we heard they were calling in a medivac, but we didn’t know who was hurt.After almost 4 hours of non-stop fighting where we had to be air dropped ammo because everyone had gone black (ran out), we had two apache attack helicopters come in and pretty much lay waste to the last enemy positions. Our two platoons that were on the objective finally gathered together near a small compound to rest. Everything was pretty quiet when the platoon sergeant from the blocking platoon came to the doorway and yelled out that he needed some guys inside to help move bodies. As I got to the doorway I could hear a woman inside crying and screaming hysterically and the same platoon sergeant yelling back at her. I figured it must have been her sons or someone she knew that we had killed.I walked up the small earth steps to where 3 bodies were laying. I didn’t really care who they were because…fuck them. They fired at us and got what they deserved. I saw the one furthest from me first and he didn't have a face; it was just a mass of bullet holes. I went to the guy closest to me and waited for my team to gather around the body so we could carry it down the mountain a little ways and load it into the incoming helo. I reached down to grab the strap near the guy’s right foot and noticed he had similar coyote tan boots as the ones we were wearing. I was pissed. We had recently given a bunch of boots to the Afghan Police and here they were wearing the shit that we gave them. I looked up at the hands that were folded across his waist and couldn’t believe it…he had an Oakley glove on one of his hands! These motherfuckers! I was getting pissed! The clothes he was wearing were so filthy I could barely tell what they were. The enemy usually wore “man jammies”, but this guy had on an Army Combat Shirt or ACS. They were brand new and we had just started wearing them. How had he gotten one?My eyes quickly moved to his arm and there I saw…my friend’s name in bold letters…SOUTHWORTH…written on the patch. For the first time I looked at his face. It still wasn’t computing. I looked back at the first person I saw laying on the ground. His face was still gone so I couldn’t tell who it was. Then I found his nametape…DELUZIO…I still didn’t get it. Why were these assholes wearing my friends’ clothes? One of my best friends from my team finally snapped me out of it. I had been holding the strap getting ready to lift up the body and I guess I was just frozen there. At some point I must have asked him what happened and who these people were. He told me, but by then, I already knew.As we were carrying my friend down the mountain another one of my friends from that platoon looked me in the eyes and he just started crying. I couldn’t control it. I carried Tristan Southworth to the helicopter dripping his blood and my tears the entire way. I was still crying when I climbed up into the helicopter to drop him off and I asked the medic inside to take care of him. It was hours too late, of course, but I didn’t know what else to say. He assured me he would and I got out of his helicopter.I don’t think I cried again until almost a year later, July 29, 2011 to be exact, when I was on my second tour. I might need to wait a little bit before I write about that one…Here are some pics of the area for reference.View from our COP. Not sure what they’re called, but you can see the “steps” cut into the mountainside. Imagine that in much steeper terrain where each “step” is 5–10 meters highHere you can see the river just past the camels. Everything happened on that side of the river because they knew we would have to find a way to get across which gave anyone firing at us a chance to escape or blend in.