Reflections

I looked out the door of the Huey helicopter into the orange, yellow, and purple fan rays of the sunset over Southeast Asia. The air was cool up here—about 70 degrees compared to the 112-degree heat just 2,000 feet below us.It was June…

I sit staring at the empty chair next to me. We know whose chair it is. He isn’t coming.His name was Sam. He’d grown up in the country, the child of a military family, and he was obsessed with computers. We affectionately called him “our…

This time, I don’t wrap the picture frames, vases, and other delicate souvenirs in bubble wrap, or place them in Tetris-like defensive positions inside a large brown box.I don’t need to; the boxes aren’t going far.After years of going where…

My wife and I sit in a large auditorium in El Paso, Texas, waiting in anticipation, along with other families, for our daughter’s return from deployment. Upbeat music fills the air and the feeling in the assembled crowd is of a group of…

There is no doubt in my mind that military pilots have egos stretching to the stratosphere. I found out early in my military career that fighter pilots, as a group, are a bunch of assholes. I learned to tolerate most of them, but none…

I shared my big news with friends while visiting them out of town over Mother’s Day weekend. I planned to begin in vitro fertilization with a donor to freeze embryos later that year.The couple, a fellow Navy veteran and their spouse, had…

“This place needs a fresh coat of paint,” Mike said to me as we stood in the flag-bedecked United Nations Square in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Mike, my executive officer, was the king of dry wit. Besides his sense of humor, Mike was a superb…

So, why EMS?That question came up often in the first few months on the ambulance, and it was an understandable one. I worked part-time for the county’s 911 emergency response system while I completed a master’s degree in creative writing in…

On an October day in 1966, the sun rose in the west, a man was seen biting a dog, Hades reported ice storms—and the U.S. Marines asked the U.S. Army for help.Okay, the first three things didn’t happen. Normally, the Marine Corps is the most…

The sun clung to the horizon at four p.m. that November day in Alaska. From my office, I quickly did the calculations—if I left now, I would have just enough time to scoop up my children from daycare and fit in 20 minutes of sledding before…