Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters

by Lt Col Mark Weber

  I gritted my teeth the next morning, delivered my remarks, and then flew home and checked myself into the hospital, which turned into a week-long stay.

  When doctors told me a feeding tube was now unavoidable, I again waited until I was left with my own thoughts, took a knee, and just let the tears flow. The idea of not being able to eat food—to be denied something so fundamentally joyful and social and normal—was overwhelming.

  Since I was a little boy, I couldn’t remember crying as often as I had in that past year. As a young man, maybe I’d cried a dozen times in fifteen years, with great sorrow at the funerals of my grandparents and with joy at my wedding and the births of you boys.

  Now I saw profound sadness and joy in everything. As a friend of mine jokes, I cried at card tricks and supermarket openings.

  I also laughed as much as I ever did before—and I’ve always laughed a lot.

  Laughter has come naturally to me during hardships and crisis, but I think it would be misleading to say that’s just who I am. Humor is a coping mechanism of choice, and it had always seemed to reward me, so I chose it a lot.

  All my life, I’ve sought out perspectives that could wring laughter from pain, and I got an early start with an alcoholic family and a shower-room bully. Finding and sharing humor with dignity, grace, and even respect for those who see no humor in a crappy situation takes work so it doesn’t come off as being crude. I’m sure we’ve all seen the devastating result of a poorly timed or poorly handled joke.

  Over time, I’ve learned to console myself and others in the proportional relationship: the worse the situation, the funnier the story.

  * * *

  Oftentimes, finding humor not only produces a good feeling, it helps me communicate—particularly with three young boys. Humor has helped us get into topics you might otherwise have just drifted past.

  Within weeks of arriving home from the hospital after the big surgery, I commented to you all that I was about as useful as the family cat, Abby. All I did was eat, sleep, and defecate. At least the cat had a litter box and didn’t really smell as she strolled around the house. Even if I didn’t find the comparison funny, you boys did, and it helped us talk about all sorts of related topics.

  Two years after the surgery, my digestive system and liver have been permanently damaged, and the smell that still comes out of me can only be described as unholy. Anyone who has been on a hunting or camping trip and experienced the effects of a changed diet might begin to relate.

  In addition to the foul-smelling gas, my drainage bags are portable sacks of poop-smelling juice. They accompany me everywhere and produce an odor as permanent as cat urine or skunk spray.

  Sometimes Kristin follows me around the house, making sure the gas hasn’t turned into a liquid. Nothing contains the smell—and believe me, we’ve tried.

  The cat doesn’t disagree with the comparison. Prior to the surgery, Abby always wanted to sit on my lap; I always pushed her off and said I thought her butt stank. Now she doesn’t come anywhere near me. She usually walks by, pauses, looks up at me, then continues on her way. I can’t help but hear what she’s thinking during that pause: You know what? The stink ain’t worth it. Forget the scratch and your warm lap. I’ll go rub my neck on the cement stairs and lie in the sunlight.

  For Kristin and all of you, I’ve concluded that all I can do is apologize and laughingly accept Kristin’s declaration that we’re going to light the furniture ablaze someday in a spectacular backyard bonfire. Kristin and I still chuckle about the time she lovingly told me I was on my own with administering a home enema kit.

  The addition of a feeding tube a year later only furthered the cat analogy when, like Abby, I was not allowed to eat table food. In fact, when it came to food, I was more like those finicky cats who prance in TV commercials.

  Food from a bag? Pshaw. My food can only come from a can.

  * * *

  Sometimes it helps to give yourself something else to cry about. When I was about fourteen years old, I stubbed my toe so badly that it bled. Somehow my dad and I crossed paths in my crying stupor. He expressed his concern, rubbed my back, and told me it would be okay, and then he suddenly punched me in the leg.

  “How does your toe feel now?” he said with a laugh.

  His technique may sound sadistic, and it wasn’t the first time I’d experienced it, but it worked. He had literally given me something else to cry—or at least think—about.

  When you think your life is bad or unfair, take a trip to the children’s hospital or the VA hospital or a local mental ward to give yourself a proverbial punch in the leg. It won’t change anything about your circumstances, but it will surely have you looking at your own hardships differently.

  A buddy of mine, John Kriesel, lost both of his legs in Iraq and spent more than a year in the hospital and rehab. He commented to me, “Thank God I don’t have what you have.”

  You will always find someone who has it worse than you do.

  * * *

  The one thing you have to know about cancer is that it’s crappy—literally. From surgeries and chemo comes everything from constipation to diarrhea, and from smelly to outright disaster, both in public and at home. Personal dignity is what’s at stake, and if you can’t find just a little humor in the unavoidable existence of it all, dignity is what I think gets lost quickly.

  As often happens in life, the most miserable, humiliating, indescribable moment turned out to be the funniest of all.

  Just a few weeks into my home recovery, I was still on a high dose of Dilaudid, which put my digestive tract to sleep along with my pain. Hours of immense pain in my upper abdomen turned into a fever and chills, so we went to the ER.

  The doc ordered a CT scan and discovered a partially obstructed bowel at the top of my intestine near the stomach. Though I’d had regular bowel movements, the ER doc said obstructions still occur and an enema was required.

  What happened next can only be described as professional torture in the name of medicine—waterboarding in reverse.

  They rolled me down the hall and put me up on an X-ray table, which seemed more like a big countertop. The thought of getting my first enema while I was in so much pain and whacked out on drugs caused enough anxiety by itself; it only got worse after I realized it was my lab technician’s first day on the job.

  I stared in disbelief when she rolled in the IV pole with the gallon-size bag of fluid that would be pumped up my rear end. Their emphasis on how warm the fluid was did not brighten my spirits.

  After the prep, which included inflating a balloon inside my rectum to keep the fluid from coming out, the doctor entered the room. I bit my lip to keep from bursting into laughter and considered the possibility I was hallucinating.

  The small Asian man was dressed in a black, plastic-looking gown tied so tightly around his body that it looked as if he had wrapped himself in it.

  The only light in the room came from the monitor in front of him, which made his gown sparkle; his teeth shone bright white, and his small, round-rimmed glasses looked like sunglasses. A dark hat tied around his forehead completed the dress. He looked like a mad-scientist version of The Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi.

  He was friendly but very direct, which told me he probably had a lot of experience with patients who did not relish the idea of having a gallon of fluid pumped up their exit ramp. He studied the CT images with furled brows. “Oh, you got lotta poo up dare.”

  I told him I had had regular bowel movements, but I may as well have been talking to the wall. “Yep, lotta poo dare … not nowmal dare.”

  Mr. Miyagi ordered the techs to release the fluid, and the only thing that seemed to be missing was a maniacal laugh after he said it.

  The pain of that fluid was immediately unbearable, and the back pressure pushed yellow ooze out from Buford and onto my stomach. “Twenty-fi percen dare … doing good.” About thirty seconds later, “Fity percen now,” and right then, the entire X-ray tabletop started to move. They hadn�
�t prepared me for this part of the freak show, and being high on drugs didn’t help.

  I was now inverted on the table at forty-five degrees, with my feet up in the air and head close to the floor.

  “Oh God, let me off this ride,” I yelled, half joking and half serious. The pain was so intense, I couldn’t help but moan pathetically.

  “Seventy-fi percen dare now.” The poltergeist-propelled table tipped forward and then back again.

  “Niney-fi percen … all mo dare now.” About thirty seconds later, he repeated, “Niney-fi percen.”

  “Hey!” I yelled. “You already said ninety-five percent!” I could hear soft chuckles in the room from the techs, but the doc didn’t skip a beat, even as I howled like a 140-pound baby.

  “Niney-six … niney-seven …”—longer break—“niney-eight … gotta get all way up dare … believe me … best way to clean bowel right here. You hol for fi or ten minute, and you do great.”

  I don’t think I ever wanted to hurt a man more than I wanted to hurt that doctor right then.

  Finally Miyagi finished. The tech backed out a little of the fluid and then suggested I be allowed to go to the toilet. “No,” I told her. “If keeping it in for five minutes is going to help get the mud off the walls, then leave me be.” And she did.

  What followed then, and all the rest of that day, cannot be adequately described by words. My poor rear end. Friends asked if I felt any better, but I didn’t even know what that meant. All I knew was that when the pain was gone, I laughed until I cried each of the three times I shared that story over the next two days, and that felt wonderful.

  * * *

  When you work for the most senior military officer in the armed forces, there’s a vital requirement to take things seriously and a natural tendency to take yourself too seriously as well. But throughout my career, I’ve found there is usually a time, a place, and a way to ensure the air doesn’t get too stuffy at work.

  Most people working in the Pentagon put in a normal workday. But if you work on the personal staff of a senior leader, life is very different. And it doesn’t get much busier than working for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I left the house at 4:30 a.m., and most days I didn’t get home until after you boys were in bed. It was a grueling, tireless task, but I loved it.

  Every day when I went into my Pentagon office, I walked past large photos of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Myers, and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Pace. In a public affairs office, such pictures are like trophies, a photographic acknowledgment of those leaders’ importance.

  One of the photos showed General Pace addressing a town hall, with Rumsfeld standing off to the side, staring at Pace with an intense gaze. Everyone in the office got a good chuckle when I added a paper bubble above the picture of Rumsfeld’s head with the words “Damn, he’s good!”

  The next day the photo was gone. We later found out General Pace had taken it down. Perhaps I had gone too far.

  Within hours, we had the full story. Pace loved the humorous reference, and he had taken the photo to show Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld loved it, too, and immediately showed it to some visiting dignitaries. Pace brought the photo back down to his office to return it to us, but it disappeared again. Rumsfeld had sent for it, because he wanted to keep it. He even sent Pace a personal note about it and had him come to his office to pose with it.

  Today, I have the photo of the two of them holding my mocked-up photo with two big smiles on their faces, as well as the “snowflake” memo Rumsfeld wrote to Pace that day.

  TO: Gen. Pete Pace

  FROM: Donald Rumsfeld [with handwritten initials]

  SUBJECT: “Damn, he’s good!” Photo

  I see you’ve made the wall in my office under Karzai and Musharraf. Good company. All source intel reports a leading member of the “Pete Pace Maximum Leader” Committee put the poster in place—sometimes you have got to take matters into your own hands, I guess.

  And, yes, you are good.

  DHR

  Rumsfeld was referring to the fact that Pace was a contender to replace General Myers as the nation’s top military officer. Shortly after this incident, General Pace was selected to be the new chairman, and he later sent me the Rumsfeld “snowflake” with a personal inscription handwritten in the lower margin:

  Mark,

  Never let a promising career stand in the way of a good joke!!

  With Respect,

  Peter Pace

  General, USMC (Ret.)

  16th CJCS

  Just like the “duck walk” so many years ago, this small gesture—in this case, a well-placed bit of humor amid the chaos of life—managed to generate more positive attention than I had bargained for.

  * * *

  My time in Iraq contained as many absurd moments as Joseph Heller’s book Catch-22.

  There was the crowded flight with Babakir, in which he was randomly asked to intercede in a quarrel between a British and an Arab traveler. Or the time my Ford Explorer pickup truck (with coalition checkpoint credentials) had been stolen from a landing zone and I feared it had been turned into a car bomb. Or the time when, against my better judgment and at Babakir’s insistence, he and I drove through Baghdad in a rusted-out, late-model car with no escort, no weapons, and no protective gear.

  Then there was the night in Iraq when I’d just flopped into my bed after a very long day and I heard what sounded like a combination of popping corn and hail bouncing off the roof of the trailer.

  My roommate turned off the TV, and I shot up from the bed. When we lived on Fort Leonard Wood, Kristin and I could hear hundreds of soldiers shooting their weapons on “range row” several miles down the road from family housing. This noise, however, sounded like tens of thousands of people firing weapons from every single direction, including the thump-thump-thump of heavy machine guns.

  Iraq had beaten Syria in a soccer game.

  We learned the next day that the celebration killed forty-three Baghdad citizens.

  In terms of sheer density of absurdity, however, nothing approached my adventure as an accidental gunrunner.

  During a social gathering of all the advisors to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, I received a call on my cellphone. It was Babakir’s cousin Kurdo, and I could hear Babakir speaking in the background. He needed help. Several trucks had arrived at a coalition checkpoint loaded with weapons for the Iraqi Army, and they weren’t allowed to pass.

  One of the senior advisors, an Aussie general, said he didn’t think I should help. “No, mate, we need to get the Iraqi J4”—logistics—“involved in this. Just stay out of it.” Though I fully agreed, it was 5:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, and this was a personal request from the top regarding a coalition checkpoint issue.

  I walked over and explained the situation to the officer who advised the Iraqi Ministry of Defense on logistics issues. Instead of helping, he vented his frustration about working with the Iraqis, then offered this useless advice: “I think this is a prime example of where we need to let them fail.” Besides, he explained, there were no real procedures to deal with this.

  “Wow, that’s brilliant,” I said. “So that’ll teach them not to use procedures that don’t exist.”

  I had no idea how I was going to accomplish the task, but doing nothing was not an option. Knowing Kurdo was already en route, I broke into a trot across the rooftop where we were gathered, stepped through the door, and bounded down the narrow staircase.

  BAM! The sound of a bat hitting a ball.

  My lower body shot forward, and I did a backflip as everything in my hands flew across the room and I landed on the cement floor below.

  I had failed to clear the available headroom, and my forehead had struck the landing above.

  I immediately heard two officers standing just a few steps away yell out, “Ohhhhh!” They rushed over to me as I tried to sit up. “You better take a moment,” one of them said.

  “I’m
fine,” I replied. “I just need a minute here—I know that must have looked bad, but my pride is hurt more than anything else.” The knot on my forehead and the dripping blood didn’t make me very convincing.

  “You don’t know that, bud. You may need to see someone for that,” he replied. I sat there patiently, but my focus was still on the checkpoint. I sat a few minutes to humor my Good Samaritan friends, then jumped up, thanked the officers for their assistance, and bolted out the door.

  When I arrived at Checkpoint 18 on the far west side of the Green Zone, it felt like I’d stepped into another dimension. The checkpoint was run by Russian-Georgian troops co-located with Iraqi soldiers and a hodgepodge of interpreters who could speak Russian and Arabic, but not English. Kurdo could speak English and Kurdish, but not Arabic. So none of us could communicate with one another outside of frantic hand gestures and furrowed facial expressions.

  Pointing to the weapons trucks was all I needed to clarify our purpose for being there.

  The trucks were parked out past the checkpoint blast walls. Kurdo nervously tugged at my jacket, begging me to stay behind for safety. His anxiety was understandable. Just a few months earlier, a large supply truck had tried to enter through a checkpoint and blew up as it was searched.

  Of course I was anxious, but I did not intend to stand behind blast walls, shouting out orders to people, even if that was possible. I looked in the back of the trucks and dropped my head into my hands. There were at least a thousand weapons just tossed into the bed of the truck in a massive heap. I figured this haphazard arrangement was what was making the guards nervous, so we made our way back to the checkpoint.

  The Georgians called for their chain of command, and ten minutes later a Georgian captain and a lieutenant showed up. The lieutenant was at least six foot four, spoke no English, and looked and sounded like Dolph Lundgren from Rocky IV. He wore a crisp uniform and sported a pair of sleek sunglasses.

  Standing next to this giant was a Georgian captain of five foot four with workable English. He seemed competent, but he looked as if he had just been pulled out of a duffel bag. His uniform was incomplete, his equipment unsnapped, his helmet band pulled away from his chin, and a cigarette dangled from his lips.