Faces of the fallen and the Sound of Birds

It’s five in the morning, foggy and chilly, too cold to sit on the deck and greet the birds as they revel in the daily fact of dawn or to watch the squirrels as they go about their daily mischief.

Coffee cup in hand I retreat from the weather to the online world and surf to Iraq where the weather is much warmer and the only fog is that of war, a war so far away.

In the news I find a feature series “Faces of the Fallen” and as I read I note that many of the faces are only dark silhouettes. It somehow brings me sadness to think that they should appear this way before the living.
A face or a silhouette and as I move my cursor across the page I see the names appear below the faces and the faceless alike which offers some small comfort. At least, I tell myself, we have their names.

Above the names, above the faces and the faceless appear the dates of their deaths and this is all we are told, all we are to know of these young men and boys, these young women and girls.

We know of their death but no report is given of their lives. We know the date they left us behind but of their birth or how they spent their brief time among us we will forever know little.

There is no gender in these silhouettes yet I know that Mothers dressed some in tiny pink dresses and others in miniature blue coveralls. Oshkosh B’Gosh comes strangely into my mind and the image of my son now grown. I feel a sudden shame.

From this page I can tell you that Michael Probst was a young man who became a Marine although he still looked like a boy and I know that when he died he was a Lance Corporal.

This is all that we left him as a legacy or at least all we will be permitted to know.

From the name Alecia Good I know that she was probably a child that Mother dressed in frills, I cannot see her face, she was a Senior Airman when she died on the seventeenth of February. Fate decreed that she become an American silhouette.

I know only that they were. I know only that they are no more, that they arrived and soon departed.

From somewhere I can almost hear the wrenching sounds of grief from those who knew them well and loved them. The spirit of their loss fills the clouds above with sadness and hides the sunlight, and from the window I cannot hear the sound of birds.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
http://sawdust.eponym.com/blog