Submitted by Pete Creasey via internet article
Eglin Joint Base Command located near Ft. Walton, Florida, is presently the largest Military Complex in the world and encompasses a large
contingent of Air Force units, Naval Warfare units, and the 7th Army Special Forces and 6th Army Rangers.
My home is exactly 5 miles outside the main gate of Eglin AFB.
Most folks in the USA don’t live in a Military Town, with lots of guys in uniform walking the streets and jets overhead daily. They go on with their lives unaware
of what a Military Town is all about. And that’s OK…but I want to share with you what it’s like to live in a Military Town. We see guys in uniform all the time, we have state of the art, high-performance aircraft in the air nearby all day long. We hear the
SOUND OF FREEDOM when an F-22 or F-35 streaks over the house….and we read in the local paper, some times daily, but at least weekly, of the loss of one of our own in combat in the Middle East.
And that is what brings me to the reason for this email’s….
Staff Sergeant Mark DeAlencar was 37 years old, had a family and was a Green Beret with the 7th Army Special Forces stationed here in the Fort Walton area. He was killed on April 8, 2018, while fighting Islamic State in eastern Afghanistan. He promised his adopted daughter, Octavia, that he would be home for her High School Graduation. He didn’t make it. But she went to graduation anyway. And in the audience were eighty (80) US 7th Armed Special Forces soldiers from her dad’s unit in full Parade Dress uniform. Additionally, they brought THEIR FAMILIES to be with them, as well.
And as Octavia ascended the steps to the stage to receive her diploma THEY ALL SILENTLY STOOD UP. And when she was presented her diploma they ALL CHEERED, CLAPPED, WHISTLED…and YES,CRIED. Everyone in attendance then stood up and cried and cheered. Octavia had graduated and yes she had lost her Dad….but she had 80 other DADS to stand there with her and take his place. I just wanted to share this moment with you… and remind you that
THIS IS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO LIVE IN A MILITARY TOWN. This is the real America we all love….and I’m proud to be part of it. May God Bless our men in uniform and their families who give so much!!
(Take a second to pass this along to someone you know. It’s the least we can do for Octavia and SSgt Mark DeAlencar, 7th Special Forces, United States Army.)
Arvol Brown USAF Retired….
Great read …. Can relate… Time served with 474th Tac Fighter Wing Nellis Air Force Base … Las Vegas, Nevada Through two Tours (1 tour 3years and 2nd 5 years total of 8 years) and one deployment with the wing to South East Asia during the Vietnam War in 1972…
For that Top US Tourist City…. Las Vegas Extremely demonstrated Support for Our Air Force Members and families There.. An Appreciation “Week” every year.. City wide Military Discounts .. Discounts to Buffets, Tickets to major Las Vegas Shows. Discounts to many Sports/ work out/ recreational / activities…. Honor and appreciative for the City support and to have Served there ….
Wow Pete that is moving!!
Anger finally released:
LIFETIME ANGER MANAGEMENT
THEN a good soldier at twenty I went whole where you ordered and did what you told me to do for
a year and came home, heart cracked and bleeding for a beautiful people who wanted peace but
were paying exorbitant bills on a scrap between you and Ho which should have been settled by
gentle men but instead became a grapple to see who would be king of the mountain for a day or so.
While you played Sisyphus, lives that counted were being pounded into the earth, many into
their own and brothers into a foreign one. Once having done my dastardly bastardly duty I came
back with a newfound madness and anger at the blowing wind to a hostile home, a place I left to
happy-horn Herb Alpert but returned to bold-bugle Barry McGuire sounding out destruction, a
madder place and angrier at me than I could know while in the Reds’ rockets’ glare with shrapnel
spinning in air seeking me out. It was you, Lyndon, who merited the many missiles of spittle we,
the ordered, sustained on your behalf, and equally the bullets you ordered for Jack, who planned to
preclude the journey you sent me on and intended to quit your second-term mission to his
succession. Dwight had forewarned us of you and your friends, the military-industrial complex
glued together by the kind of politics you embraced and fostered while Woodstock and Haight
Ashbury rolled a different stone in heads, the sort that grew from pebbles into one bigger than
yours. Harry had quickly washed his hands with the charcoaled atoms of a proud people, but you
chose to lather us with the slow soap of body-count accounting, laundering the books with the myth
of Tonkin and the promise of a better world, one that you never delivered, a vow which netted
nothing from a gross loss. Then expletive-deleted Richard came along and at least got us the hell
out of that hell but then impelled us into a new room in that manifold mansion where deceit is
falsely painted white.
NOW fifty years on from ground zero the explosions of anger have not died out but are managed by
the life sentence of un-paroled imprisonment locked away under the thick skin of necessity. No
comfort, but a curse, I recognize my fellows with inmate intimacy, whether low on homeless streets
of despair or high in marbled towers of prosperity. Like an invisible bar code on their foreheads
there for my scanning, their living ghosts whisper of familiar farms bought far away, which first
appeared as rice paddies to quicken people but then ended up only starving them into oblivion by
the pestilent bullets that ate into their flesh like a violent carcinoma spreading poison quickly to
their quick. We unwillingly live with this lingering daily death, though not with a constant
consciousness. It seethes subcutaneously with wildly variable temperatures, but we always feel it
there, often with numbed scar tissue and sometimes with tender lachrymal response. Our souls
were napalmed and agent-oranged in that small space for that short span, and the tendrils of those
implantations punched holes in our lives, limping little mollified through all the rages of our roads
to the places we now reside. Toxins still spill from our pores but only in measured volumes to
preserve humanity. We have become war-to-grave managers of a parasitic hitchhiker we
unknowingly picked up on a side road to our highway, a leech that seeks to bleed us of the life we
desperately try to preserve to a peaceful end. If we are successful, we keep private a beast that lives
to gain generalship of all we count precious. Lives lost, loves lost, families lost, fortunes lost,
aspirations lost, minds lost, all in a holocaust of war-ignited costs have issued from this internal
infernal adversary that defies both excision and exorcism and but scarcely abides containment.
But Lyndon, the chaos of my anger is the least of your concerns in your new country and is left to
me to manage.
DBE
10/3/16