Here Roger is, again in Garden of the Gods, with Pikes Peak in the background.
Besides Mike Mebs, Roger is my oldest friend (or friend whom I have known the longest) since our days at Minot AFB. I have no idea what happened to Dave Moore or Randy Bancroft from our days at Yorba Junior High School. Dennis Zito's wife did not friend my request on Facebook, so I don't know what they are up to these days. They were from my Marine OCS months and beyond.
But, off and on, Roger and I have kept in touch over the many years in between Minot and now.
It's always valuable to have friends who can remind you of you were a long, long time ago, when you were both younger than words can now describe.
Those who know you now can sometimes barely discern that it is you in those old photographs from long ago and, usually, far away.
What happened to the clothes we wore then? Or the hair we used to have so much more of?
We could not often define how our lives were going to turn out. When we would lose our parents along the way and other family members or friends.
On the phone a few weeks ago, Roger told me that he finally looked up the accident report for Tom Brundige back in the early 1980's. It seems that an inch or so of his parachute fabric, as it was being deployed after Tom bailed out, caught on the ear piece of his helmet and, when it yanked, broke his neck on a bailout that otherwise would have been survivable.
His friend was gone because of something so minuscule, made significant by something that should not have had any significance at all. You lose a friend over an inch, or fraction of an inch, of material that was intended to help save your life.
Fractions of an inch in combat are often the difference. But his death was in peace time. Or the remaining few years of the Cold War if you would have it.
It was not as if it were decades in between my resignation and the time when everything related changed so dramatically and, we hope, forever.
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