Hills of a different sort

By Craig Ziemba / guest columnist

March 16, 2008 12:33 am

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Via satellite TV from my tiny hooch in central Iraq, I caught 30 minutes of a pseudo-reality show documenting the lives and loves of the young, rich, and beautiful in Beverly Hills. Arriving via BMW at trendy café’s, these privileged teens deal with such weighty issues as, “Which shoes should I wear to the club tonight,” or “Should I move in with my boyfriend?”
Looking at Hollywood’s depiction of popular culture, it’d be easy to think that America is going down the drain. But before you despair know that on the other side of the globe, thousands of other young Americans live very consequential lives in hills of a different sort. They’re the same age as the ones on TV, but worlds apart in maturity, responsibility, and experience.
Across the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers, Marines, and airmen barely out of high school are making history every day. Our enlisted troops look incredibly young to a 39-year-old codger like me, but they’re every bit as brave as the soldiers who fought at Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima.
Like most kids their age they like to joke around, dream about girls, and wear iPods. But unlike the spoiled stars of the silver screen, they know the meaning of hardship, sacrifice, and courage. Their idea of getting dressed up for a night on the town includes Kevlar plates, a 9mm pistol, an M-4 rifle, and a backpack complete with anti-coagulants they pray they’ll never need.
A wrong call on Sunset Boulevard could cost you a date or a snubbing by the in-crowd. A wrong call on patrol in Baghdad could cost you and your buddies their lives. These teenagers won’t be spending Spring Break at Cabo or Cancun, and their Hummers don’t have shiny chrome, but they’re pretty cool to me.
Yesterday evening I landed at a remote airfield for gas. As soon as we shut down, an Army Private and a Corporal hustled over from the helicopter they had just hot-refueled and strapped a hose to our plane. They were professional, motivated, and glad to talk. They’d been working twelve hour shifts for ten straight months on an airfield that’s frequently shelled by Al Queda fighters from the high ground south of base. But when I asked the Corporal how things were, he didn’t complain. He’s planning on going to college next Spring and hopes to become an Army helicopter pilot.
I thought about that young Corporal late that night as I drifted to sleep in my hooch. While there’s much about America’s culture that disturbs me, I can’t help but be encouraged to think that hundreds of thousands of young American veterans like that young Corporal will bring home with them a maturity and abiding love of freedom that makes them stand head and shoulders above their peers.
The sound of a distant mortar round followed by a .50 cal response woke me up three hours later as one of the 19-year-old Privates on watch in the tower 40 yards from my bed fired warning shots toward a potential intruder. I stepped out on the wooden pallet that serves as my front porch and watched the black night sky for a moment or two before going back to bed confident that those young soldiers on watch tonight have got me covered.

Craig Ziemba is a military pilot who lives in Meridian. His book is available at Meridian Bible Bookstores.