The Last Time We Ever Met Pt. 1

  "I've seen your face before my friend but I don't know if you know who I am." -Phil Collins

  The boredom was typical. The bus was hot, the seats were cold and the city stood damp in the mid-morning. The droning diesel engine breathed black plumes that followed us through the streets like ghosts. I was on the express line going to the one place I didn’t want to go; my job. My only concern about the next nine hours was the promise of a double latte and the possibility of finding some new records. It was a usual morning that would likely end up with me racing back home after work so I could see Rosey and watch Star Trek with her on the couch.

  I was probably listening to my iPod but I couldn’t say positively. My thoughts drifted from the dirty streets and back to the quiet discomfort of public transportation. I felt my cell phone buzz in my pocket. When we lived in Seattle Rosey and I both had phones and we lived on them. We called each other quite often and usually there was no news, just a quick “Hi, I miss you.” or “Damn, my job sucks” so there was nothing unusual about the familiar vibration of the phone in my pocket; in fact I often thought I could feel it buzzing even when I didn’t have it on me.

  Always one to be self-conscious about talking on the phone on the bus I reached for my pocket and was discreet when I opened it. I whispered “Hello?” It was Rosey. Her voice which on these dull bus rides tended to sound otherwise happy had on this particular morning held a deep foreboding. As she spoke clouds of uncertainty gathered in my mind and as I suffocated on tones of language and tears I heard her say “Damon hung himself.”

  Clearly I had misunderstood what she was trying to tell me. Certainly she was calling me to tell me that she could pick me up from work later so I didn’t have to take the bus home, certainly because Damon was very much alive and well. He was my friend, a Marine, a First Recon Marine. The Special Forces of Special Forces, trained as an expert in survival. He had fought and survived twenty something consecutive days of deathly combat in Iraq. He had been back for almost three years. In fact he was going to medical school to become a doctor and Kate was Rosey’s cousin so we would have known if something had happened. An impulse compelled my body to ask her to tell me again, and then my world went quiet and then it went grey.

  The words were not eloquent language, they were not beautiful expressions of communication, they were not even words. They were unfathomable lyrics to an impossibly sad song that someone else was singing. The sun did not come out that day. The spring trees seemed to bare no leaves and loomed spiritless. There was nothing beautiful to behold. There was nothing at all. I crumbled before the dead city and a nightmare of sadness enveloped me. Damon Fawcett my friend who went to war was dead.

Sgt. Damon Fawcett  (2nd from left) A-Co. 3rd Plt 1st Marine Recon Battalion en route to Iraq 2003. I would love to know who these guys are and what they remember about Damon. (photographer unknown)