Bryan Strawser

Major General William Troy writes in today’s Washington Post about serving as the General Officer assigned to funeral duty several times over the last few years:

My funeral duty has taught me a lot. The cynicism with which some people view politicians doesn’t square with what I’ve seen. Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski and Mike Gregoire, husband of the governor of Washington, attended just about every funeral I went to in their states. Absent the media or official entourages, they personally expressed condolences to grieving families. I’ve learned that the Patriot Guard Riders motorcycle club may seem unconventional, but its members’ patriotism and sincerity are undeniable.

And I’ve learned that war most often claims the lives of young kids who go out on patrol day after day, night after night. They go because they are good soldiers led by good sergeants. They go with a singular purpose: to not let their buddies down. Each soldier we lay to rest shared that goal. They kept faith with their comrades, even in the face of danger and death. That is the most humbling lesson of all.

For all those that have given their lives - or sacrificed in other ways - for their friends, their comrades, and their buddies around them at that awful moment… but most importantly for the freedom of total strangers like my family and I - know that today you are never far from our thoughts.

The end of the year brings us the changing of the calendar from one year to the next. Another year older, another step or two in our lives, a few friends lost, new friends gained.. perhaps some accomplishments behind us - and our dreams ahead.

The new year has always been a time of great reflection for me - an occasion of sorts where I look back upon what has been wrought in my life and make a belated attempted to make sense of what has transpired - be it good or bad.

As I’ve said before, some things this year I have handled poorly - some with grace - but always with an eye on being a better person than I was the year before.

This year has been a tough one for the President of the United States, George W. Bush. Hampered by a Democratic Congress intent to block or take credit for anything positive - the President was able to sell a surge strategy that appears to be working with US troop deaths down for the last seven consecutive months. The level of commitment required from our civilian and military leadership was apparent, however, when General David Patraeus stated that “We’re not doubling down here. We’re all in.”.

We also witnessed the real beginnings of Presidential politics, if one could call it that, this year with the official launch of the 2008 Presidential campaigns. As I write this, the Iowa caucuses are just a few days away… and that means that the primaries aren’t far away either. For the first time that I can remember, both races for the nomination are wide open. But I’m already sick of the campaign season - and still haven’t selected a candidate that I feel is worthy of my support.

Much can happen between now and November, however. It will at least be interesting - if we don’t tune out. Both of which are possible.

In April, I “competed” in my first bicycling event, along with two co-workers. We did the 30 mile course of the Minnesota Ironman in what I thought was a reasonable period of time. It was my first time riding in a Peloton with a few hundred of my closest friends. I’m looking forward to the race next year…

As many of you know, I love to read. The best book I read in 2007 was Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein. While I have studied Einstein’s theories in high school and college, I was not aware of all of the struggles of his life and the backstory of how he came to the United States. The most important lesson I learned from Einstein’s book is that one cannot attempt to solve the problems confronting them if they choose to be bound by the constraints that are in place at that time. Einstein’s development of the theories of relativity came about in part because he refused to follow what were the accepted practices in physics at that time.

September brought about the sixth anniversary of September 11th - even six years on a painful day for many to remember. I referenced back to what I had written three years ago:

In the end, I think we all have the responsibility to remember what happened that day - to us - to our fellow man - here in our own country.

A few weeks ago, while having coffee with a peer in Minneapolis, our conversation steered towards the impact of September 11th on our lives - both personally and professionally.

She pulled out her PDA - tapped on it a few times - and spun it around so that I could read it.

It was her calendar - turned to September 11th, 2004 - and it showed just one word:

Remember

October brings us the fall classic. Once again, my team did not let us down - coming from behind in the American League Championship Series to sweep the Colorado Rockies in the World Series.

It’s nice to be able to enjoy the successes of a team that has broken my heart so many times in years past.

All of this comes with being a member of Red Sox Nation.

As we age, we lose friends and family members - some from our small nuclear or extended families - and others from the larger community in which we live.

David Halberstam died back in April of this year. A Pulitzer prize winning biographer & author, Halberstam died in a car accident while working to research an upcoming book. His final book, The Coldest Winter - a look at the Korean War, was published just a few months ago. I’ll miss the books that he never had a chance to write.

November brought us the death at age 92 of Brigidier General Paul W. Tibbetts. The New York Times tells the story:

In the hours before dawn on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted off from the island of Tinian carrying a uranium atomic bomb assembled under extraordinary secrecy in the vast endeavor known as the Manhattan Project.

Six and a half hours later, under clear skies, then-Colonel Tibbetts, of the Army Air Forces, guided the four-engine plane he had named in honor of his mother toward the bomb’s aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima, the site of an important Japanese Army headquarters.

At 8:15 a.m. local time, the bomb known to its creators as Little Boy dropped free at an altitude of 31,000 feet. Forty-three seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno that left tens of thousands dead and dying and turned much of Hiroshima, a city of some 250,000 at the time, into a scorched ruin.

Colonel Tibbetts always believed that he had done the right thing - saying later in life that “I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took. It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”.

And a few weeks ago, we learned of the death of Dan Fogelberg, a soft-rock artist that I remember well from my youth. Fogelberg died at home after a long fight with prostrate cancer. His song, Leader of the Band, is one that has resonated with me over the years:

My life has been a poor attempt
To imitate the man
Im just a living legacy
To the leader of the band.

I’ve much to be thankful for as the year comes to an end. Friends. Family. Work. Fun. Games. I continue to be awed at the courage of men and women in a variety of roles around the world.. and I continue to be inspired by my fellow bloggers. On this, the last day of the year, Lex reminds us about General George Washington, and why we are fortunate that men like him walked this earth.

As far as this blog goes, 2007 brought about my return to the world of personal blogging after almost a year and a half of silence with this post on Memorial Day remembering those that had given their all so that we might live in freedom. And perhaps, at the end of the year, their sacrifice is the one lesson that we should always remember. Some, of course, can’t seem to grasp what that lesson is.

I hope that you and yours have a safe & happy new years. I’m looking forward to the challenges & laughs that 2008 will bring to each of us.

Previous editions: 2004, 2005, sadly, I was on blog hiatus in 2006.

I’ve said what I’ve had to stay on this subject a few years back.

I still remember…

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

-A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

It is true that one day a week was given over wholly to religion. On Sunday mornings my brother, Paul, and I went to Sunday school and then to “morning services” to hear our father preach and in the evenings to Christian Endeavor and afterwards to “evening services” to hear our father preach again. In between on Sunday afternoons we had to study The Westminster Shorter Catechism for an hour and then recite before we could walk the hills with him while he unwound between services. But he never asked us more than the first question in the catechism, “What is the chief end of man?” And we answered together so one of us could carry on if the other forgot, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” This always seemed to satisfy him, as indeed such a beautiful answer should have, and besides he was anxious to be on the hills where he could restore his soul and be filled again to overflowing for the evening sermon. His chief way of recharging himself was to recite to us from the sermon that was coming, enriched here and there with selections from the most successful passages of his morning sermon.

Even so, in a typical week of our childhood Paul and I probably received as many hours of instruction in fly fishing as we did in all other spiritual matters…

- A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean

Someone asked me, the other day
What it is that lay at the end of the rainbow.

I smiled and said that I didn’t know

“But I keep striving for it, whatever it is..”

Maybe it was something that we weren’t ever meant to find…

Twenty years ago today, I was an eleven year old sixth grader at Covington Middle School in my hometown of Covington, Indiana. I remember that Mrs. Woodrow was my teacher for the english class I was in.. and we were working on an assignment, or a reading, or something similar to that.

My neighbor, the principal’s secretary walked in and whispered something to Mrs. Woodrow. The students, of course, were all watching intently as this is not something that happened very often. She then left.

Then our teacher informed us that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded after take-off in Florida, killing all of the astronauts aboard.

I don’t remember how I felt or even what happened for the rest of that class. I do remember a few hours later going to the library where most of the staff was gathered around the one television in the school watching the news coverage, most with tears in their eyes.

I was always interested in the space program. As a teenager, I thought I might study aeronautical engineering and perhaps attend the Naval Academy, but life had other plans for me. A visit by my family to the Kennedy Space Center a few years later reminded me of that dream, but I had already begun thinking of another course to take.

It wasn’t until years later that I was old enough to understand President Reagan’s words that evening after the Challenger had been destroyed - and now, twenty years later, they endure as a fitting tribute to those seven brave souls.

“There’s a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.” Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”‘

Technorati Tags: shuttle

Year’s end has always provided me with an opportunity for introspection - to gaze upon fondly, and sadly sometimes, at the year now past.. and to look ahead, with hope, at the year ahead.

The year 2005 began, as is appropriate with the New England Patriots winning their third Super Bowl in the last four years - in a year filled with nary a scandal.

January 20th, as is our tradition every four years in this country, brought us second inauguration of President George W. Bush. The year has not been kind to the President, who has had to endure more losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, the indictment of an aide, and the leaks of highly classified programs. Yet he seems to have regained his stride by year’s end, and I hope that 2006 brings a different tone to the debates here in this country. After all, we are still a country at war.

In April, I purchased a new bicycle, a Trek 1200c road bike. By the time the winter season had come to Minnesota, I had ridden an average of eighty miles a week. Some weekends in Minneapolis, saw three consecutive days of 25+ mile rides.

2005 brought a new job for me, moving into our corporate headquarters for the first time as a staffer, one of two responsible for crisis management worldwide for the corporation. And in the course, we relocated to Woodbury, Minnesota. While I knew that natural disasters were likely going to be my lot come the fall season of the year, no one could have predicted that one of the first we would handle would be the terrorist bombings in London.

It was during the bombings that we first saw a foreign flag fly over the United States Department of State, and that we heard Tony Blair say this:

It’s important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.

Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilized nations throughout the world.

Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma were the focus of the entire third quarter of this year for me & the team that I work with. We spent nearly fifty days in crisis mode working to support our team and partners in the affected areas. And that is only a small amount of what FEMA and others had to deal with.

Even local police departments worked to support those in the affected areas by deploying police officers into New Orleans. From their blog, they shared this comment from a man driving past them in Illinois as they traveled towards Louisiana:

Dear Sir or Madam:

On my way to work today I saw a long-ish line of police-type vehicles, & as I made my turn I could see on their sides “Minneapolis”!

Please extend our sincere thanks to all of the folks from Minneapolis, as well as Bloomington, Ramsey County, Roseville, and Maplewood, who have come down to help, and to those who are pitching in at home to make their trip possible.

Thanks!!

Robert

It was the summer when Lance Armstrong defied all expectations and pedaled his way to a dominating 7th straight Tour de France win. We were awe-inspired by his victory in such a manner… if you had read his book from a few years ago, one would know that he was nearly felled by cancer. Now, at 34, Lance is retired and is working towards a cure through his foundation.

August brought about the final stages of the move to Minnesota - selling the house and finally leaving Massachusetts. August 24th was the last day. This picture shows our front door on our last 4th of July in Boston.

Massachusetts will always hold a fond place in my heart. It was the place we first owned a home - and a place of many wonderful explorations of our nation’s history. We’ll be back there a few times this year for some events and some work trips, but our journey there has ended. But I’ll always miss the quiet majesty of Concord and Lexington, where this great adventure known as the United States began.

As is the sad case in every year, 2005 saw many that we loved and admired leave this world for whatever lies beyond the last breath. Some of which I’ll always remember.

Shelby Foote passed away in mid-year. He was perhaps the greatest of the civil war historians of all time. His trilogy of books chronicling the battles between the north and the south span nearly four thousand pages. And his hours of interviews and narration in Ken Burn’s The Civil War are among the best in any documentary. I will always remember him for the closing statement of The Civil War:

“In time, even death itself might be abolished; who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning role call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again to hastily don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the long roll summons to battle.

Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise, and all will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well, and there will be talking and laughter and cheers, and all will say, Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?”

It was towards the end of the year that I was shocked by the death of actor John Spencer, who played Vice Presidential candidate Leo McGarry on NBC’s The West Wing. Leo was the character to me that made this show what it is. One of his most memorable lines came when ending an episode with fellow staffer Josh Lyman:

This guy’s walking down a street, when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out.

A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you! Can you help me out?” The doctor writes him a prescription, throws it down the hole, and moves on.

Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole! Can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.

Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole! Our guy says “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here!” And the friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

2005 also brought us the death of one of the icons of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, Rosa Parks. This nation afforded her the honor that she deserved as she became the first woman to lie in state beneath the Capitol Rotunda. So much happened because this woman refused to give up her seat.

One of the most moving and dramatic passings of the year was that of the Bishop of Rome, Pope John Paul II. His funeral paused the world for a moment while we each watched the scene in Rome and absorbed the lessons that this man left us in the manner of his death. His funeral was among the most majestic the world has seen. And his own personal testament left a lasting impression:

As the end of my life approaches I return with my memory to the beginning, to my parents, to my brother, to the sister (I never knew because she died before my birth), to the parish in Wadowice, where I was baptized, to that city I love, to my peers, friends from elementary school, high school and the university, up to the time of the occupation when I was a worker, and then in the parish of Niegowic, then St. Florian’s in Krakow, to the pastoral ministry of academics, to the milieu of … to all milieux … to Krakow and to Rome … to the people who were entrusted to me in a special way by the Lord.

To all I want to say just one thing: “May God reward you.”

Lastly, this year ends with one photo that is symbolic of all those that gave their lives this year so that we - and others around the world - may live in freedom and security. In a year, where we have lost so many, it is only fitting to take time at the end of this year to reflect upon the year that was - and what lies ahead. We have chosen the more difficult path to take - but the right path - and in doing so we will see freedom continue to grow around the world.

I wish you and yours a Happy New Year - and am looking forward to a great 2006!.