Silver wings & a golden ager

Army, Jan 2003 by Dunnigan, Edward

The emergency department of a Detroit hospital was the last place I expected to learn a lesson about the Army. My own Army career during the early 1980s as a unit supply specialist in the lst Ranger Battalion was brief and uneventful. At the time, the Marines in the peacekeeping force in Lebanon were getting the heck pounded out of them. The Soviet Union was embroiled in a war with Afghanistan and the hostages held in Iran had been returned.

However, for the Army it was a time of rebuilding. The Carter years had cut the budget to the bone and President Reagan was doing his best to repair the damage that had been done. I had joined up as an alternative to joining the growing ranks of the unemployed in my native Detroit. My only real accomplishment during my enlistment was the completion of the basic parachutist course at Fort Benning, Ga. However, being in a unit like the Ranger battalion, I noticed that jump wings were as common as shoe polish. I certainly wasn't thinking much about them 10 years later.

When I was hired to work at St. John Hospital in Detroit, one of the first things I noticed was the abundance of pins and decorations with which my coworkers had adorned their identification badges. A small helicopter meant that they had loaded a patient onto a medical chopper, a stork with a baby meant that they had delivered a baby at some point. There were pins for length of employment, attending different seminars and sometimes just for decoration. It was as if each person was displaying a little of their personal information along with their names on their identification badge.

One night, while looking through a desk drawer, I happened across an old pair of jump wings. Almost on a whim I affixed them to my identification badge. The effect was profound. My coworkers wanted to know what they were. Once they found out that I had been a paratrooper, they wanted to know more. While I was always careful never to "fly under false colors" lest they believe that I was some sort of hero, it amazed me that the things that I thought were commonplace, they thought impressive. When I related to them how, on one jump, I was caught in a thermal updraft and was actually going up instead of down, they laughed in disbelief.

When I told them of night jumps, exiting the door of a C-130 into the dark night sky, they visibly shuddered.

While I still didn't think that being airborne meant all that much to the civilian world, I did take some small pride in having done something that few others had done. I didn't know that other people would notice those wings-people who did know what they were.

Among my duties in the emergency room, I was responsible for transporting patients to radiology for X-rays. I approached a tense, balding, wrinkled old man who looked as if a strong wind would blow him away. He watched as I came towards him, squinting as if to focus on me, "Where'd you get those?" he said in an abrupt and accusing voice.

"Where'd I get what?"

"The wings. Where'd you get `em?"

I smiled, "I earned em the hard way."

Visibly relaxing, he smiled back, "You were in, huh?"

"Three years, two and a half years as a paratrooper."

"I was in for two. How many jumps did you make?"

"I think between 75 and 80. 1 never really kept too close a count. How about you?"

"Seven. Five in Jump School and then I jumped into France on D-Day I got hit a couple of days later, got back to my unit just in time to jump into Holland."

"Sounds like seven was enough."

I dropped him off for X-rays and went back to the ER. He returned several minutes later. I grabbed the various needles and whatnot that I needed to draw blood and walked up to him, "Time for me to draw labs."

"Did you see any combat?" he asked suddenly.

"No, I joined up and peace broke out all over the world. Heck, I was just a supply clerk. I don't know what I would've done if I would have had to fight."

"You would have been okay; you're a paratrooper."

After I had dropped the tubes of blood off at the lab, I came back to his side to talk. The whole time that he was there, we swapped stories about jump school. He answered my questions about his jump into Normandy and he told me of the bitter cold nights, the constant shelling and the constant fear at Bastogne. I stayed with him through my lunch break and finally transported him to his room in the main part of the hospital. It wasn't until I made it back to the ER that I realized that I had forgotten to ask his name. All that I knew was that he had been a corporal in the 101st Airborne in 1944-45.

All he knew about me was that I had been a paratrooper in the 80s. I mentally shrugged; I guess that was enough.

It was then that I had a moment of profound clarity. Those wings hadn't just decorated my uniform, but they had marked me for life.

EDWARD DUNNIGAN served in the Army from 1981-84 and was in the 1st Ranger Battalion as a unit supply specialist.