Prologue

I don't have any photos from Dover.

I don't fucking want any.

I worked there just before they built the new facility. The old facility, a holdover from Cold War days, was square and modest, with nothing indicating it was what it was aside from the hearses coming and going. I remember that it rained a lot that spring. I remember the facility smell and how that smell mixed with the smell of rain when the garage doors opened. The receiving area was small, not much larger in square footage than a three car garage, and looked similar. After entering the building you walked past front offices, and then took a left into a long room with an equally long table. Down the entire length of the room, ribbons, patches, and any accouterment the DoD issued hung on the wall. Uniforms rested in various stages of being puzzled together on the centerline table.

Remains were rolled in on gurneys through the garage door and into autopsy--where I never went or even looked beyond a side-eye glance. I avoided looking like it was an SAP program I wasn't read in on. Which was stupid since I didn't need to look. They rolled right past me, one after the next, literally inches from the table upon which I folded their respective flags. They were rolled in from a holding facility immediately next door that was somewhere between the size of a large garage and a grade school gym. This is where I did look. I couldn't help it. This was the image that etched the reality in my memory.

So many.

Wrapped in gauze.

In pieces.

I pretended it was my job, and acted as professional as everyone else did. I wonder now if they all pretended too... because everyone else was pretending. The sense of somber respect floating in the air was another scent in the air that no one ever talked about, but was equally powerful.

They kept the overhead door half-opened with large fans blowing out the opening. Personnel sat outside the door with binoculars, watching the fence line across the airfield, scanning for reporters and media trying to get pictures. This was amid the very public debate about photographing flag-draped caskets.

I never understood why that was an argument. They were heroes... at least my heroes, and I was in awe; I assumed everyone was.

To be fair, these were neither caskets nor flag-draped. And that's why I was there. Flags. I assisted with a few uniforms here and there, but the preponderance of my duties while there was just folding flags. I used a gurney and clamped down a "table-top" (two lengthwise folds) flag on one end and folded the 13 triangle folds myself. I did in fact fold flags until my knuckles bled. What I never told anyone was the embarrassment and shame I felt for it. The blood seemed laughable and insignificant. It was the first moment where I began to feel like I could never bleed enough to make it right.

What's not in the book is that I kept a list of every name. I carried that sheet of paper in my wallet until 2007. It was in my pocket when I pinned my Lieutenant rank on. I had it in my flight suit for my first flight as an Air Force pilot.

Dover was a weird superposition of superpositions. Beauty and horror. A cognitive dissonance of honor and shame. Dead heroes that never die. I can never take Dover back, but I would never take it back. I left Dover, but I never really left Dover. My men left the gate in hearses, but they never went home. Dover poisoned something in me, but also inoculated something in me. It weakened my mind but strengthened my heart.

I went to Dover because I couldn't get in the fight. 15 years later, it would be Dover that kept me in the fight.

And it all started with Capt. Russell B. Rippetoe. ...and his boots.