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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
This happened on Interstate 78, in New Jersey, in November of 2003: While listening to a story on NPR's "Morning Edition" about a National Guardsman who'd been killed in Iraq, I found myself in tears. At the time, I was driving from Manhattan to visit my younger daughter and her new baby, Tobias, who was then about three months old. Because my daughter's husband had to be away from early morning until late in the evening on Tuesdays, I'd been going to New Jersey once a week to keep her company and do a bit of babysitting; we called the arrangement Tuesdays with Toby. The birth of a grandchild is an event that tends to push emotions toward the surface, and that may have been particularly true in my case. My wife had died in September of 2001. The delight I took in Toby's arrival--and in the arrival of my older daughter's baby, Isabelle Alice, who'd been born in the spring of 2002--was sometimes difficult to uncouple from the way I felt about my wife's not having lived to enjoy her grandchildren. So you could say that my emotional defenses were not fully in place. Still, I was astonished that my response to a story about a young man I'd never heard of, a thirty-year-old helicopter pilot from northern Illinois named Brian Slavenas, was to weep.
First Lieutenant Slavenas, I was informed by the voice of Bob Edwards, had been in command of a Chinook helicopter that was brought down by a missile as it ferried soldiers on the first leg of their trip out of Iraq for leaves. Sixteen people were killed and twenty injured--one of the first big casualty reports in the period when Donald Rumsfeld was still saying that the continuing violence in Iraq was being caused by a few dead-enders. Brian Slavenas had been a member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois. "Morning Edition" ran a segment on him by Susan Stephens, of Station WNIJ, which is affiliated with Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb. He had been "physically huge," Stephens reported--six feet five, two hundred and thirty pounds. But from her first couple of interviews, with a high-school buddy and with a teacher whom Brian had worked for during the summer as a furniture mover, it was apparent that he wasn't the sort of big man who used his size to intimidate. The teacher, Lance Gackowski, talked about how, in pickup basketball games, Brian would cheerfully continue to concentrate on putting the ball in from under the basket while a couple of opposing players hung off him. The high-school buddy, John Rossi, said, "He wouldn't hurt a fly."
Something else that Rossi said was not the sort of thing you'd expect to hear about a young man who'd just been described in terms of his size and strength: "We'd get into conversations and, say, if we couldn't get a conclusion to something, the next day he'd go to the library or go on the Internet and look up the information and call back and go, 'O.K., I figured out what we were trying to figure out.' He just wanted to know." His step-mother, Christi Slavenas, said something similar. Barely keeping her voice under control, she said that Brian was "very self-disciplined and studious and interested. He liked history. He liked reading, he liked talking to people about ideas."...
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