It is undoubtedly my favorite part of every wedding. That awkward, but strangely forthright moment when the preacher asks the crowd for any objections to the couple's marriage. No one ever objects, of course, but it's still a raw, if tense, moment. I just love it.
I suppose we had that ubiquitous ritual in mind back in 2007 when Keith - a close buddy and fellow officer - and I crafted our own plan of objection. The setting was Baghdad, Iraq, at the start of the "surge" and the climax of the bloody civil war the U.S. invasion had unleashed. Just twenty three years old and only eighteen months out of the academy,
my clique of officers had already decided the war was a mess, shouldn't have been fought, and couldn't be won.
Me and Keith, though, were undoubtedly the most radical. We both just hated how our squadron's colonel would hijack the memorial ceremonies held for dead troopers - including three of my own - and use the occasion of his inescapable speech to encourage we mourners to use the latest death as a reason to "rededicate ourselves to the mission and the people of Iraq." The whole thing was as repulsive as it was repetitive.
So it was that after a particularly depressing ceremony, perhaps our squadron's tenth or so, that we hatched our little defiant scheme. If (or when) one of us was killed, the other promised - and this was a time and place where promises are
sacred - to object, stand up, and announce to the colonel and the crowd that we'd listen to no such bullshit at this particular ceremony, not this time.
"Danny didn't believe in this absurd mission for a minute, he wouldn't want his death to rededicate us to anything," Keith would have said! Luckily it never came to that. We both survived, Keith left the army soon after, and I, well, toiled along until something snapped and I chose the road of public dissent. Still, I believe either of us would have actually done it - even if it did mean the end of our respective careers. That's called brotherhood...and love.
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