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Posted on 09/14/2001 7:42:15 AM PDT by Abn1508

I REMEMBER

I remember the cool under the mulberry tree. It was just around the corner and down the stairs from the French class. It hung over one end of the soccer field. The soccer field that was dirt and rocks. I remember falling and coming up my hands bleeding; not a foul, I’d just fallen and now my clothes were covered in dust and my hands were bleeding and I was laughing.

I remember the cool. And the cool morning eating the juice, ripe purple running over our fingers as we laughed.

I remember.

I remember the hills. The hills south of Davoudieh. How we would play tag and “king of the mountain” building forts out of the scattered stones. I remember I called mine “Ravenloft” or some such, from the Hobbit, and I would cry “The Eagles!” and the other children, the blonde boy who was American and the dark haired boy who was Iranian, they just didn’t get it.

I remember.

There was a shepherd’s hut, a rude structure made of sunbaked bricks, rudely fashioned and rudely stacked. But it kept the wind out, a bit, and it kept the snow out, a bit. And one group of boys would take it and hold it for a while and then another. Eric would be proud; it was a real class struggle. I was the ringleader of the bourgeoisie “muckety-mucks” who went to school and could someday aspire to college and the other groups were Teheran street rats. But we effete held our own.

I remember the knife fights. I carry the scars. But there was no hate, just the thrill to see who would keep the fort. Who was better and tougher than the other group. We all ate the same bread and the same coke and water and we all used the same weapons. The rocks that were everywhere on those dirty, stony hills, with the knives we bought in the bazaars, big ones, little ones, ones with little pox…I remember.

I remember how we would all huddle around the same fire when the cold was too much for us to bear…

I remember walking my first girl friend home from the bus, such a cold day a bitter wind off the mountains and the sky a dull leaden grey and the snow in the corners, she was beautiful and long legged and blonde and oh so sweet and her hands were so cold as we paused in that little antechamber all the houses had and I remember her hot blue eyes and her hands on my chest and then we were there, kissing and writhing against each other on the floor on the tiles so cold and her hands on the back of my neck…so cold…

I remember. We were children. Really children, eleven if we were that old. We knew there was something we wanted and we wanted it badly but we didn’t know what or how or why…

I remember…

Cyprus. God what a god kissed country. Land of Aphrodite and it looks it. And the checkpoints between the Greek and the Turkish side. And the soldiers. And the little stand where we bought wine, a mix of the sweet and the sour he told us and I’ve never had a finer vintage since. I remember the crusader’s castle, where Richard’s wife awaited his return. For decades. There were 128 steep steps up to the queen’s room. There was a hint of something there, watching the adults around me I knew there was something more than my father’s comments. “He didn’t like his wife very much.” And then I learned later the story of the bard who had searched all of Europe for him. And I thought that was cool. And about ten years later I put two and two together and got, as it was, four.

I remember.

And the mortar scars. And the story of the Greek, or was it Turkish?, unit that had held out for days in the old castle, cutting off the pass. And the morning that we woke up with my mother screaming because the cannons were going off… And it was Greek (or was it Turkish?) independence day and they were in celebration… Not in anger. Again.

I remember.

I remember.

I remember reading Roland and Oliver on those hills. And wanting a horn like that. And reading Asterix and wanting a magic potion. And reading the Two Towers, and wanting that horse. The belly dancer in Isfahan and the pretty girls that were on the trip and the laughter... Perhaps making a pass at a sixteen year old wasn't going to work but what the hell...

I remember.

Persepolis and where I found out the significance of forty. See, in the olden days, the young guide explained among the ruins of the Room of Forty pillars, no one was literate with numbers. And forty was a number that everyone knew was very large. So whenever there was a large number, whatever that number was, they said “Forty” and the people went “Whoa! Forty!” It might have been 27. Or 7000. Forty people died on 9/11. Think of it that way.

I remember.

There are 110 pillars, fallen on the floor. And the steps into the palace that were so low and so wide and so strange. For people. They were made for horses… Riding your horse into your throne room. Now, that was cool…

I remember.

Sitting and looking up at the giant map of Iran and Iraq. Lying on my pink silk and cotton coverlet, staring up at the map with my well notched scimitar. It was aluminum with fake plastic jewels in the handle. It was notched from beating it on the other kids’ swords. I remember.

I remember standing before the map of my fronts, with pen in hand, directing this division this way and that division that way. Take the Zagros and I’ll handle the Hindu Kush, we’ll give those Iraqis what for…

Do you remember? Patton? “All my life I have wanted to lead a lot of men into a daring battle…”

I was Xerxes. I was Cyrus. I was the leader of the Armies of the Shah and I was…well, I don’t know what the aim was. But we were, by golly, going to complete our mission or die in the snows… When it come to the mideast, I always was the worst whore of a mercenary. I didn’t care who or for what. It was time to do battle…

My catechism name is Michael. I saw the icon. It was in a Greek Orthodox Church. There was this guy with a flaming sword upraised and his foot on the head of the devil. Man, right then I knew who I wanted to be. I was in the St. Michael Society in the Airborne. I lost my medal. I miss it in these troubling times.

I remember.

I remember my mother coming back from far lands and telling me of her adventures. Of waiting in Kandahar in the heat in the plane because it couldn’t take off until there was a bit more air pressure…

I remember.

I remember her pictures of the Khyber Pass and her tale of watching the bushkazi with the horseman who rode into the stands and the other, a chief, getting off a beautiful white Arabian stallion and beating it with his crop for not being fast enough… The jewels, the mass of lapis and rose quartz that she poured out of a simple bag. Like the fiery treasures of the ancient Persian kings to my innocent eyes. I remember the rings. The rings that she had made in elaborately chased gold for all her daughters and daughters in law. In lapis and gold and rose quartz, flashing and sparkling in the sun.

I remember…

The gold-red walls of Petra at dusk. And the haunting call of a bird as the sun went down. And the simple hole that had been knocked in the aqueduct, cutting the impregnable city off from water and dooming it. I've seen so many aqueducts in my time.

I remember…

The clay of the walls of the bazaar in Teheran. And the walls of the bazaar in Jerusalem. And the gold and the lapis and the aquamarine and the rose quartz, the jewels spilled onto the carpets, caught in the occasional shaft of sunlight. The beautiful roman gladius that I saw in Amman that my mother wouldn’t let me get despite the fact that I had my own money… And the tap, tap, tap of the brassworkers and the smoke and the smell of spice…

I remember.

I remember the barbari shop down the street, the bakers. For a few rials you could buy two big pieces of bread and take it up to the hills and that was lunch. And a coke for a nickel.

I remember.

And that bitch of a first girlfriend still owes me fifty rials. I swear, some day, I'm going to look her up and get it back. No interest, though. It was fun while it lasted.

I remember.

I remember standing by the big lake up in the mountains and having my dad comment on the levels and the strata and everything in the world. And the first time I went snow skiing, what a disaster. And the carpet markets of Tabriz and the little girl in the carpet room in Isfahan who somehow I knew would be in that room the rest of her life. It was dark and dingy except for the beauty of the threads going into the carpet. That would end up on the wall of some house in West Fairmont, Virginia.

I remember.

The train through the Zagros in the dead of winter. And the men and women and children by the side of the train, picking up the grains of rice.

I remember.

I remember the first time I ever heard bagpipes and drank scotch, in the “managers” bar of the compound my dad lived at in Abadan.

I remember the road to Bandar Shapur. Straight as an arrow across miles and miles of salt flats. And on every side, every fifty yards, for miles and miles and miles there was a wreck.

I remember. The flames from the refineries. Eating pistachios and being let listen to the grownups talk. The pictures, the amazing collection of pictures, my dad collected of wrecks in Iran. The little hill forts. And thinking about the olden days when I had been a hill baron, controlling the trade route through the mountains.

I remember.

I remember.

I remember and love it all.

In a different time, in my other incarnation, I was one of the hill robbers. I was a mercenary general kept by the King of Persia. I was the leader of the Immortals. I was the lord of Petra, fighting off the hated Romans.

I remember. And I love it all.

Don’t you dare accuse me of hating one bit of it.

I love it today. I even love it today. Perhaps, I love it more today than I ever have before.

I remember Operation Olympus. When the United States Navy and the United States Marines and the United States Army were planning for Iwo Jima times seven hundred and fifty. And I remember their jests that Halsey had been right. That when they were done they would pick a few of the babies out of the wreckage and bring them up speaking English. And that would be all there was of the Japanese race. Because there was no way back no way out, but a genocide that the Japanese had brought down upon themselves. Hard, cold, genocide. Through bitter necessity.

I love it today. I love all of it. I love the Pathans, the hardest and toughest fighters in the world (barring possibly the Ghurkas.) I love the Iraqis, a people often addicted to color. And I love especially the Iranians, true Persians, people who have a history as old as man and who love it perhaps too much. I even have a place in my heart for the Palestinians, a group who have been crapped upon harder by their “own” kind than by the Israelis.

And I don’t want that the only way that it will ever be seen, ever be known, ever to be experienced, to be in an oral history.

I Remember.

So…

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage,

Because I Remember.

John Ringo The author is a native born Euro-American who traces his ancestry in the states back to the 1680s. He is a veteran of the United States Army, 82nd Airborne Division and has traveled extensively throughout the world.

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