I’m on an early flight, seat 12A, confident in my ability to assist in an emergency and therefore righteously ensconced in the exit row. En route from my home in Wilmington, North Carolina to Pittsburgh to deliver an address to the members of the Duquesne Club’s Rod and Gun Society, I’m reading a review copy of Monte Burke’s recently released Rivers Always Reach the Sea in preparation for interviewing the author. The flight attendant pours me a cup of apple juice, leaning in to whisper conspiratorially, her voice betraying Philadelphia roots, “If I have any left, I’m bringing it all to you.”
I’m not sure what I did to deserve the largesse, but she appears fifteen minutes later and drops a carton of Minute Maid on my tray table with a wink, saying, “I have to throw it out anyway.”
I am a Generation X kid, but one would think I am a child of the Great Depression, as I am constitutionally incapable of passing on such serendipity. I’ve done nothing to earn this scarcity mentality. I grew up warm and healthy and safe, folded into the bosom of the middle class, assured my future would at least be tolerable, if not comfortable, or even luxurious, by the standards of 95% of this world. Still, if I throw this juice away, I’ll spend the day thinking of starving kids in Africa even though there is no future in which I’m going to come off this plane and put the remainder of this partially drunk carton into a box labeled “Starving Kids in Africa” to watch it wing it’s way off to someone who desperately needs it. So, as surely as I sit writing these words over the Virginia Tidewater, I’ll carry this paving brick sized portion of apple juice off the plane and drink it as if I had come upon it in the desert. I am often my own worst enemy. I should work on this.
But once upon a time I found myself atop a hill, crouched with three other Marines in a shallow hole scraped out of desert hardpan, counting the sound of explosive projectiles leaving a mortar tube and then the corresponding “kaaaaRUMP!” of each one bursting around us and now I tend to seize the moments when they’re given.
Mortar crews try to bracket a target, gauging range corrections from impacts observed relative to the target at which they’re shooting. Once they’ve put a round on either side of that target, they cut the difference by half and drop the next dead center. If effective, the call comes to “Fire for effect!”, sending multiple rounds to destroy the people and things caught in the impact zone. It’s like a slow-motion car crash, leaving you with enough time to wonder if you have reached the moment of your demise, yet too little to do much about it. However, you can figure out roughly how far away are the people trying to kill you based on counting time of flight, your life suddenly measured in Mississippis. Combined with that distance, a compass azimuth towards the origin of the sound gives you a direction and thus may you do unto others as they would do unto you.
Five times I counted as rounds burst ever closer to me and mine before a sixth whistled over our heads and exploded on the slope of our hill, sending a shower of dirt and rock skyward. We were bracketed. I looked at the three young Marines with me, a fellow Georgian, a Floridian, and an Alabama boy, and decided they were good enough men with whom to die. With dirt still falling from explosion number six, I waited for launch number seven and the projectile which would land in our hole if the crew was any good.
All that came was blessed silence.
I don’t really know what compels me to tell you that story, save to say the title of my speech to those very hospitable sporting folks in Pittsburgh, members of one of America’s oldest and most esteemed city clubs was “What the Hell Am I Even Doing Here?” It’s a question I ask myself frequently in wonder and appreciation at the direction my life has taken, much of it because of my opportunity to correspond with you.
We’ve had some great adventures here at the Tom Beckbe Field Journal over the last four years, telling stories as stirring as they were in the doing. With a fresh new look, a growing list of talented contributors, and exciting partnerships offering us the opportunity to do more of the things we love with people who love them too, I see much of my life as what they call a lagniappe in Cajun country.
I guess I am still waiting for that seventh mortar round to fall. Until it comes, I reckon I’ll drink the free juice. I hope you’ll share it.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal