The Letter

...So I wrote this letter.


Someone posted a challenge to readers to send 6000 letters of support to the members of Regimental Combat Team 6 in the Middle East, and I decided to join the effort. I had no idea what I was going to say. Eventually, I decided to write about the March 17, 2007 rally with Gathering of Eagles. And as I wrote, I started to get into it-- the way you sometimes do when you're singing along in church or with a really good song on the radio and you just want to close your eyes and let the music carry you along. It was kind of like that, only with writing.


When I was done, I sent off the letter to the address provided, and posted a copy to the Gathering of Eagles forum. I thought the group might like to see how we all looked, from the perspective of a few months later. I figured I'd get some pretty good feedback, but it hadn't been posted yet by the time I left work. I checked again once I got home that night-- quickly, because I had somewhere to be-- and discovered that it seemed to be overwhelmingly positive, but I didn't have time to read it. In retrospect, maybe I should have, because I was like a kid on Christmas Eve, waiting impatiently for the chance to open my presents. Only I was really in my mid-30s and out on the town with a good friend's bachelorette party, which I couldn't seem to keep my mind on for any great length of time. We got home around 2 AM, and let me tell you, I got no real sleep all night. I was even dreaming about checking my e-mail. Somehow I knew this had the potential to become something bigger.

On Friday morning, I finally got a chance to check the list, and the reviews were indeed positive. In fact, I was floored by some of the things they said. One online buddy said that my letter should have come with a "tissue box alert", a sentiment echoed by two off-list friends who read it later. Our national chairperson selected it as the feature article for the front page of the website sometime Thursday or Friday. Other comments came in, including requests to use my letter as recruiting information for our group, and another request for permission to cut and paste it into letters being sent to other overseas troops. I granted them, asking only that they credit my screen name and not change anything other than editing for length.

The funny thing is, that letter is not the one I would have written at the time of the event. On March 18, the day after the rally, my thoughts were of my windburned face and the mud caked on my boots. My stories were humorous accounts of eating a Subway sandwich while standing between two men in skeleton-face bandannas, and using a Porta-Potty in winter conditions. I didn't have even the basic facts of the event-- such as how many people were there-- let alone the perspective that turned the mud and the clawing wind into foils for an act of faith. It was a need to paint the picture for others that brought out that aspect of the story-- and in the process, changed my own picture of the event I'd attended. Sometimes doing for others can bring out resources we didn't even know we had.

I can look at this in two ways. In one way, all I did with my letter was to make a fairly large splash in a fairly small pond. But in the other, the ripples from that splash found an outlet to travel all the way across the ocean. I know my letter has gone overseas at least twice. I know that the members of Regimental Combat Team 6 were glad to receive my letter, even if most of them will never get a chance to read it. And in the end, that's really what it's all about, because I did it for them. Just like we all did, back in March.

(To read a copy of the letter as posted, please go to this link:
http://gatheringofeagles.org/2007/06/21/to-marines-from-a-war-eagle/)