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Whirlwind Drops on Dying Town With Tragic Word of A Fallen Son
Eight years ago I was driving through eastern Montana one evening when I stopped in Glasgow, barely a town some 55 miles south of the Canadian border. In a diner on Glasgow's Main Street, a stack of newsletters, dated from the same day, announced a lecture and slide show for that evening titled, "Eastern Montana: Paradise or Purgatory?" to be delivered at the local high school library by Don Baker, a Montana historian.
A predictable pattern emerged as Baker showed his slides, from yellowed images of bustling towns and main streets of the 1920s and 1930s to color slides of the same towns now shuttered and dead, with Baker their eulogist. Melstone: "What was one time a community of 1,200 is a community of 200 today," held together by one last oil field at the north end of town. Emory: "It was a town that didn't last very long. The soil here is very rocky, very shallow, and it's windswept. This is all that remains, a school that became a community hall." Ismay: "This became a town of about 1,200 people. It had two of everything. Two banks, two mercantiles. The editor of Ismay's newspaper, then called the Yellowstone Evening Journal, stated that on Saturday night the streets of Ismay were busier than Chicago's. It became quite a town."
What a name, too -- the fusion of Isabel and May, daughters of the president of the Milwaukee Road railroad that was nailing its ties through the Montana prairie in 1908.
That's how it was in the Plains back then: The landscape's future could be inscribed on a whim, but not quite conquered. Eight years ago, Ismay was a town of 21, its cemetery census outnumbering the living by more than 10-to-1. Ismay tried to grasp at glory one last time in the early 1990s when it renamed itself Joe for the duration of each NFL season, so it could be known as Joe, Montana, after the famous San Francisco 49er quarterback. The stint got the town's residents an invitation to David Letterman and articles in all three national newspapers. But even that burst of fame died and dust devils again became the only whirlwinds to occupy the town.
Until this.
Last week I read a blurb in the paper about the death of Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, 26, in Iraq, a member of the 82nd Airborne who was to be heading home to his wife and 5-month-old daughter soon.
Just another death, maybe: We pretend to mourn for those soldiers sacrificing for who the hell knows what anymore in Iraq, but in reality the mourning is abstract to nonexistent for most.
Those ceremonious pretensions of supporting troops are what enable the feeding of cannon fodder with a clean conscience, however unconscionable the war.
But Gray was from Ismay. His immediate family now lives in North Carolina. His parents, grandparents, a brother and a sister are all either in Ismay or nearby Miles City.
For dying communities like Ismay, the lives of native sons and daughters all over the world are all they have left. Take that away, and you get a sense of the shock wave a death like Gray's has on those communities, and the devastation it leaves behind long after the press reports move on to the next soldier's pointless death elsewhere.
Gray wasn't a nameless soldier, of course. None of them is, and Gray even less so: His father, Richard, wasn't repeating rote pride when he said that, for all of his son's desire to be in the 82nd Airborne since he was 5, "he wasn't any mindless robot."
Gray was one of the seven active-duty soldier-authors of a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 19, "The War As We Saw It," that demolished recent claims politicians, academics parachuting into Baghdad and Washington commentators were making of any progress in Iraq. (One other of the seven writers, Omar Mora, also was killed with Gray, in an apparent truck roll-over that killed five other American soldiers and two Iraqis.)
Gray's and his colleagues' criticism of the war can't be countered by those who claim that higher brass or the president know better. Not at this point. Not anymore.
Grunts know what others either don't or refuse to see. Nor can Gray's death be chalked up to some worthy sacrifice. He served with honor. His country betrayed him.
And now a 5-month-old girl grows up half-orphaned while a community in eastern Montana mourns a pointless loss on top of fated ruin.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com.
© 2007 Daytona Beach News-Journal
10 Comments so far
Show AllTo say "We pretend to mourn for these soldiers sacrificing for who the hell knows what anymore" is a total copout!
Anybody with a 3 digit IQ saw through the lies about WMD, 9/11 links, etc. and therefore KNEW prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that it was all about OIL. Credible sources have come forth ever since (the latest being Alan Greenspan) and reconfirmed that it is all about OIL.
Any member of Congress who voted to invade Iraq is either 1) dumber than I am, and/or 2) hopelessly corrupt. When I vote for Congressional representatives or for the President, I will not vote for anybody who is dumber than I am OR hopelessly corrupt, and neither should you. Anybody who supported or supports the Iraq invasion is damaged goods and should not be elected or re-elected to public office.
"Gray wasn't a nameless soldier, of course. None of them is, and Gray even less so: His father, Richard, wasn't repeating rote pride when he said that, for all of his son's desire to be in the 82nd Airborne since he was 5, "he wasn't any mindless robot.""
Don't these people know that the military has absolutely NO USE for autonomous thinkers, much those who act autonomously? What part of "CHAIN of command" is unclear? Once you are under someone's command, you're in chains. It makes no difference at all, under those circumstances, whether you're mindless or not. You remain a robot -- and if you resist, you will be attacked by those who are.
It's an utter deceit that soldiers are permitted to refuse illegal orders; once you wear the uniform, there ARE no illegal orders -- if your superior says it, you do it. While a few objectors have won their cases, or had charges dismissed, the written rule is a lie, the unwritten one remains in force.
And, I'm sorry, but a parent who doesn't know what the military is and how it operates and how utterly powerless their children are once they enter must have been in a coma since 1965.
And let not forget. George W. has yet to attend a single funeral of the soldiers and marines who died for him.
Was the truck rollover an accident?
????......
Saul: As telling as it is to point out Bush's failure to attend any troop funerals, if I were in Gray's coffin and if I had any say in the matter, I wouldn't want Bush at my funeral. I'd much rather have those I served with present.
These are the communities which put George Bush in the white house twice. These are the communities which cheered when their young men (and women) went to Iraq to kick some raghead ass in retaliation for 9/11. These are the communities that make best sellers out of right wing christian books which look forward to the destruction of most of the people of the world while the precious few of the saved are being raptured up into heaven.
As always, Tristam hits the painful nerves and empathy of those that Gray and others like him left behind.
For anyone here to deride his choices or the support of his father and family, is truely inhuman.
We, the still living, that knew the truth of this war, marched in the millions around the world to stop this war before it began. We were not heard. We write, e-mail, phone our "representatives" in Congress to stop this madness. We are not heard. We "vote the bums out" and hope that the promises to end this war will be kept in 2007. The promises have all been broken and more thousands have died, been maimed, or displaced. Just last Sunday, we marched in the 10's of thousands in D.C. with hundreds of arrests. Not even a blip on the MSM airwaves. We were not heard.
We are ALL part of this bloody machine of war in one way or another. Gray gave his life and his views. We give our tax dollars, and future generations the debt. None of us is innocent in this. I will not fault or judge another for giving his life for the shame that belongs to me and my country.
Didn't Montana vote heavily for Republicans back in 2004? Btw, nice to finally give populist Democrats such as Schweitzer and Tester a chance at something. Unfortunately, they'll be dismissed as irrelevant as long as the rightwing NAZIs control the midwest.
Many of our so called volunteer army are actually economic conscripts. They don't join the military out of choice but out of necessity. They don't volunteer as much as have no other option if they want to support their family. If only they had a choice.
And let's admit it. Many of the supporters of the war are the same ones fighting and dieing so in fact they are reaping the consequences of their own actions. But is is still a waste and a betrayal. Because the truth is that this war is based on lies. It isn't a mistake. It was intentional, and it was wrong.
I wouldn't encourage any of my family members or friends to join the military. In fact, I would strongly discourage them.
Don't vote for more war.
www.NotOneMore.US - Pledge for Peace
Nice work Mr. Tristam - simultaneously bringing into the light many of the plagues of America.
To me, there is a strong synchronicity with the slow death of a town due to short-sighted opportunism and the quicker death of a economically -enlisted soldier in an army pursuing a short-sighted modern economic policy