LONSBERRY: The Other Day At The White House

When the sergeant major died, I almost cried.

Driving down the road, listening to the audio book, the one David Bellavia wrote.

That little break where you choke back emotion. There’s half a sob, and a swallow, and a watering of the eyes, and a deep breath, and it’s gone.

I had that happen when the book got to the part where the sergeant major was shot through the head.

His daughter was seated to my right in the East Room, a tiny gold star in the pin on her blouse. Like the one her mother wore, one seat over.

The other day, at the White House, watching a man get a medal.

I had spoken the night before to a man who had done the paperwork on the remains, and who had, as a medic, tried desperately to save the lives of the company commander and the XO, who also died back then. In Fallujah, in November of 2004.

Ramrod in his uniform, the president to his left behind the lectern, David Bellavia looked pained by the applause. Tortured. Not in body, but in soul and psyche. The applause continuing, he almost imperceptibly shook his head, “No.” He has done hard things, and they have forever shaped him. But this might be hardest of all.

When he got home from the war, his dad took him down to the car dealership to talk to Charlie Nesbitt. Charlie flew helicopters in Vietnam, and he came back different, too. And they saw it in one another’s eyes, and that scared David, because he thought it meant it never goes away.

And probably it doesn’t.

On the motorcade to the White House, the three big buses strung out with an escort of wailing motorcycles and squad cars, tourists crowding the sidewalks near The Mall holding up their phones to take pictures or make videos of the passing spectacle.

“Imagine how that feels to David,” Charlie said, looking out the bus windows at the crowd.

And how it feels to David’s wife.

The night before, at the reception the sergeant major of the Army put on, she, after most had left, spoke quietly to Gary Beikirch, who has a medal of his own. He had told her that he and his wife were praying for her and David and their children.

And she appreciated that, because she knew the medal would forever be a reminder of the worst day in her husband’s life. The day he was changed. The day she lost her husband. The day her children lost their father. The day David became someone new and unknown, and in some ways unknowable.

Gary understands about that.

He lived in a cave for two years after the war. After he got out of the hospital and went to SUNY Brockport they spit on him and called him a baby killer and that made things come loose for him so he went to New Hampshire and hiked high up a mountain and lived in a cave, growing his hair long and reading the Bible. After Nixon gave him the medal he put it in his duffle bag and didn’t tell anyone about it for seven years. He and his wife had been married quite a while before she found it and asked what it was.

Gary sat in the front row of the ceremony, one in a bank of prior recipients, next to a retired teacher who lives on 24 acres up in Michigan but who doesn’t hunt because, he explained, “I haven’t pulled a trigger since I left Vietnam.” There was a guy in a Navy SEAL uniform, and a guy with a metal hand, and a guy who couldn’t turn his head without turning his body. Guys who had all stood there, either in this room or outside in parade formation, as they got their medal.

George Washington was on the wall above them, gesturing grandly downward, on a canvas carried frantically by Dolly Madison, to the sound of gunfire, from a burning White House back in the War of 1812.

The president read a bunch of stuff and the aide read the medal citation and another aide handed the medal to the president and he put it on David, reaching around from behind the hang it around his neck.

As he did so, the sergeant major’s wife held her phone high to take a picture across the room. She had joy and pride on her face. David’s wife looked up from her seat as well. It was hard to read what was in her face.

But it was like watching something sacred. Something beyond your comprehension. Something only grasped by those who are called to pick up this fire of sacrifice and service and carry it with them the rest of their days.

All of it. Every bit of sacrifice entailed before, during and after.

The courage of the honored men. The trials of the women who loved them. The burly veterans with pride and sorrow in their hearts. The comrade with the broken body who sat beside them. The tearful embrace of an Iraqi translator. The history looking down from the walls. The glory of then and now and tomorrow, and the burnishing of grief and suffering which give rise to the glory.

“I don’t wear this for me,” they all have said.

And you believe them.