Chelsea Lane

Last night, election night, I spent a good deal of time stranded at Chicago's O'Hare airport waiting rather impatiently for a flight to wing me home to Minneapolis. Matthew and Natascha were hosting what I'll call the LME Election Night Love Fest (hey, we're all liberals and it ain't a liberal event unless there's incense, illicit drugs, tie-dye, and an orgy...one that features various gender lines being crossed) at my house. Okay, it was a bunch of wonky Minnesotans (part of what I so love about Minnesota) staring at the TV and drinking. I wanted to get home to enjoy the communal (word chosen deliberately as code to other lefties...y'all know we're really communists, right?) experience of an election night and was anxious to see election returns start rolling in.

I could have parked in front of a TV monitor in the airport and watched the early returns. But my political addiction pales in the face of my craving for nicotine. So, of course, I was sitting on a dirty sidewalk out front of O'Hare, sucking down diesel fumes and a few Camels.

When you have a lighter at the airport you are the most popular boy in town. I got to meet alot of people. 

Best among them was Chelsea Lane. We were compatriots in the pursuit of emphysema.

She's a month shy of 22, cute as hell, in that bouncy, giggly, almost 22 kind of way.

She was killing time waiting for the flight to take her home to Springfield. Taking her home for the first time in nearly two years. She had just spent three months in South Carolina. Three months during which she was debriefed in regard to her 18 month hitch in Iraq.

That'd be Sgt. Chelsea Lane. I don't know what her last name is.

She had signed up before Iraq. She didn't much like being there. She shared, in an eerily calm manner, the stories of sleeping with her weapon, getting hit with gas attacks, and losing more than one of her "combat buddies" in the fighting in Baghdad. A couple of times she got one of those thousand yard stares...the kind where you know the movie in her mind is playing a horror that you cannot, will not, will never be able to conceive of. She was scared while she was there. She is scared to go back and is hoping, hard, that she will not. She was in the Reserve. She hadn't thought part of the deal was a year and a half in combat. Or had hoped. Or something. And I learned, in the course of our short conversation, that scared or not, she was braver than I will ever be. 

When she spoke of her friends, her comrades in arms, she would bounce and glow and act like a 21 year old girl talking about her very best friends. Except these were friends she shared blood and bullets with. Some were friends who came back scarred forever, some came back with flags draped over the wodden boxes bearing them home. And though she is scared to go back...though her experience there led the Army to put her under a psychiatrist's care (to their credit this is something they are doing with most returning soldiers) during her debriefing...if called, she will of course return. She will return because it is her duty. She will return because she is a soldier. She will return because, "all of 'em are still over there and if they need me I'm sure as hell gonna be there for 'em."

So, last night once I finally parked myself in front of one of the airport TV's...once I made it home to the company of friends and acquaintances and warmth and joy...once I got to drink in a long awaited and (to my mind) much needed shift in the nation's political landscape, much to the enjoyment of the LME posse...and as I put my head on the pillow to fall blissfully asleep...I did not think of the 'wave' or the Pelosi Era or the outcome of the First 100 Hours or Tester or Webb or any of that.

I thought, instead, about a young, pretty woman with a gorgeous smile that could quickly be doused by a thousand yard stare. I thought about her as she gathered her things to go to her gate, twitchily awaiting the last leg of the long journey home to family and friends. To the way her face lit up when she said "Nice talkin' to you. And Happy Thanksgiving!" as she turned to disappear into the terminal.

I thought, as I closed my eyes, of the happiest thing I had encountered on a politically happy day. A happy thing that made this whole election yee-hah seem, well, stupid and trivial.

Chelsea Lane is going home.

Comments

[Rory]

I linked to this from my website, Rik. I don't know if the message you should take from that meeting is that politics is trivial, it's actually kind of a reminder of what politics is supposed to be about.

Chelsea shouldn't have to go back there.

[Travis]

Rik,

Thanks for sharing this. I am continually impressed by the loyalty and devotion of the members of the armed services to one another. A whole bunch of us in society could take lessons.

And I'm glad that she is home, and I hope she doesn't have to go back. Let's hope they all come home soon.

Travis