The National Law Enforcement Officer's Memorial sits quietly at Judiciary Square in Washington DC, in a dignified yet understated manner befitting the sacrifices it represents. I've been to it a half dozen or so times, and always take a moment to walk quietly around the inside of the low sand-colored walls etched with the names of the fallen. Of the 18,000 or so names, a small handful resonate personally. The rest I consider friends by association, knowing the bond they felt with other officers and the profession.
Yesterday, during an idle moment at work, I was pawing through the latest issue of a trade magazine, something to do with the latest and greatest law enforcement products. I like these magazines, even if they are the printed version of an informercial, if nothing else to have some ideas on hand the next time the budget allows the purchase of new equipment. Towards the end of the magazine, it had a couple pages detailing some of the recently killed officers. I was glancing over the articles, ever curious about the circumstances, when one name jumped out at me.
Callemyn. Officer from Durham, North Carolina. I know that name. Somewhere.
I usually hear rather quickly about an officer down in Virginia and the adjoining states, but for some reason I had missed the news. I shifted in my office chair as I read about how he had died in a patrol car wreck on the way to help another officer. News articles, or any writing for that matter, is usually so sterile that you can't begin to imagine what exactly happened, but for a brief second I pictured him running hot down the road, wishing he could be there quicker to answer his friend's calls. I stopped before I got to the end of that thought. No point, I told myself.
Callemyn. That sounds familiar.
I scratched my head, the checked the online listings at ODMP and NLEOMF, then google'd for the local newspaper.
The face in the photo jumped out at me. I know you, I thought. My mind flashed back to May of 1993, when we were classmates at the School of Infantry, Camp Geiger, North Carolina. We were in different platoons, going through the same session of the 0311 course with Charlie Company, Infantry Training Battalion. Class 14-93, I remembered, another one of those otherwise useless tidbits of information stuck in the back of my mind. I strained to remember him, pondering his easy smile and the friendly southern tilt to his voice. I remember that spring well, days of sweat and grime in the woods as I aproached the ripe old age of 19. After graduation we had gone our separate ways, he to a Security Forces Company in Panama, me to an infantry company. I never saw him again. I may have barely known you, but you're still my friend.
My desk phone rang, shaking me out of my thoughts. My stomach hurt as I scolded myself for not reading the news back in February and wishing I could have been there for the funeral. Police funerals are one of those things where one is too many, and after each time you catch yourself hoping you never have to do it again.
As soon as I got home that night, I ran downstairs to the shelf in my basement where I store some of my old Marine Corps books and equipment. I flipped through my Parris Island graduation book without finding his photo, then vaguely remembered that he had been in another series of platoons that graduated the same time. Parris Island recruit companies ran, at the time I went through, in two series of three platoons each. His platoon 2024 formed a few days before my platoon 2029, so he might have had three days' seniority on me.
I flipped through a binder I had kept from 14-93, hoping to find his name, at the same time wishing I was wrong. Not him, I thought, not my friend. A couple of dozen pages in, I found it. Scribbled on a scrap from a legal pad that had spent much of the last two decades in a ziplock bag was a list, probably a loading order for a truck, 3rd from the top.
Pfc Callemyn.
I looked at the page I printed from ODMP, his photo displaying the same world-weariness every cop seems to have. That's him, I thought.
I folded the paper up and stuffed the binder back on the shelf. I trotted upstairs to my home computer and tried to leave a reflection on the ODMP but couldn't come up with anything that I felt had the requisite dignity and honor. That's a project for another time.
http://www.odmp.org/officer.php?oid=18713
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment