Gail was in California for a few days, and I had a 7:30 tee time at a nine-hole municipal course that runs along Lake Michigan. The weather was cool and beautiful in Chicago. But it was a hot and dusty Sunday afternoon in Mogadishu, where Casey and his Ranger and Delta Force comrades were taking off in helicopters en route to a raid that was about to change the course of American involvement in Somalia.
While I was putting on the third green, Casey was dodging AK-47 rounds as he was rescuing Pfc. Todd Blackburn, who had fallen from one of the ropes the Ranger task force used to rappel from the choppers to their target. As I was trying to get out of the rough and onto the fifth fair-way, Casey was fighting his way to the crash site of a Black Hawk helicopter that had just been shot down. He and his fellow Rangers lived by a creed: they would exhaust every means to keep their comrades, dead or alive, from falling into enemy hands.
As I finished my game, some of my son’s buddies were fighting their way back to the Mogadishu airport in a Humvee with Casey’s lifeless body aboard. He had been shot in the back about a block from the downed chopper. Had the bullet come from the front, his bulletproof vest might have saved him.
Unaware of those events, I spent the afternoon getting a “care” package ready to send to Casey. I had been on the phone throughout the day with his 22-year-old wife, DeAnna, who was also putting some things together. She told me Casey had broken his portable tape player. I went out and bought Sony’s best-and batteries-and spicy beef jerky. I recorded some of his favorite C&W to round out the package and wrapped it so I could have it at the post office when it opened the next morning. It’s still in the trunk of my car. I can’t take it out,
By 4 p.m., the initial reports about the raid began to filter in over CNN. Later that day President Clinton was on television expressing his condolences to the families. The same question simultaneously hit Gail in San Diego and me in Chicago. Does that mean the families have already been notified? Gail was hopeful. My military experience told me, “No.”
I went to bed at 12:30 a.m. and awoke exactly two hours later suddenly aware that Casey was dead. I lay there planning how I would notify the family. Twenty minutes later the phone rang. DeAnna was hysterical. The Ranger chaplain had just come to Casey’s and DeAnna’s quarters at Fort Benning-214-B Christian Lane-next door to 214-C, where, 28 years earlier, Gail and I had lived with Casey’s brother and sister when I returned from Vietnam, four years before Casey was born. Chaplain Moran took the phone from DeAnna and told me what I already knew.
Casey was a planner. He had specified, in writing, what he wanted if he was killed in action. That’s why he was buried in Arlington with full military honors. That’s why I gave his eulogy in our hometown of Plano, Texas. It was at that memorial service, in the same church where Casey and DeAnna were married, conducted by the same minister who had married them, that I somehow mustered the strength my heroic young son expected of me.
I sent a hand-delivered letter to President Clinton through an influential friend. In the letter, I said that I’d included Casey’s eulogy and picture so that he could put a face on one of those “unfortunate losses” referred to in his interview with reporters. He obviously knew that we were unhappy with his characterization-which would have been more appropriate if he bad been referring to a bad investment rather than the senseless loss of 18 bright, young lives.
Eventually, my letter was answered. The president even called on Nov. 10. I told him what I’d learned about the raid from my conversations with soldiers from corporal to four-star general. I spoke of how bravely the Rangers had fought and how well they’d done, despite being outnumbered 30 to 1. I wanted to tell him that his foreign-policy advisers and the civilians selected to oversee our armed forces are not only causing military morale to plummet but are also doing a disservice to him and to the country. But, when he said that he wanted to meet with me, I decided to wait. I thought it would be better to discuss these matters face to face.
After five months, Clinton has not found time to meet me. I voted for him even though I struggled with my feelings about his youthful views about Vietnam. I was able to rationalize his protest because I too had come to understand the futility of our misguided policy in Vietnam. But how do I rationalize his policy for Somalia, a grim reminder of the ill-fated policies of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson? How do I rationalize that he sent our son to do what he had evaded a quarter of a century earlier? Casey and I served the same mistaken policy a generation apart.
I want to tell the president that the 58,191 Americans who were killed in Vietnam did die in vain if we don’t apply the lessons learned there. If he had applied those lessons in Somalia, Casey, Jamie Smith, Dominick Pilla and all the others who died that October day would still be alive. if he doesn’t apply them the next time he’s tempted to use our military in someone else’s civil war, more soldiers’ lives will be squandered.
I don’t think President Clinton was serious about wanting to meet me. I believe he wants the nation to forget those 18 brave young men who died last October trying so courageously to accomplish the frivolous mission he gave them. But, like Casey, all those “unfortunate losses” have names. And they have families and friends who remember their smiles, their hopes and their dreams. We’ll keep their memories alive for a very long time.
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