October 2, 2006

There’s an old army adage: Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome. Too, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” Steve is prior service, Air Force.(Okay, no chuckles from the Marines.) I don’t know if the Air Force practiced this same verbiage or not, but you can see that Steve incorporated the merits of its thought into the first date recorded on our blog: October 1, 2007. There is a reason for this. We wanted Aaron’s photo to stay on top, along with the intro from Steve. Since the blogs are posted one on top of the other, Steve had to trick the date on it. So, definitely, Steve is our tech side of the partnership. He’s also the traveler and risk-taker, journalist...the list grows. He’s sold most every possession he has to pull this off—(sorry, Steve, dedication like that shouldn’t go unnoticed). At this point, you, the reader, might be asking: “So, what’s your part in all this, De’on?” Don’t feel bad for asking; I can’t count the number of times my husband has said to me, “Oh, no, you don’t do anything; you just sit there and look cute, hon.” MeMa, my maternal grandmother, used to say to my mom, “Virgie Bell, I’m not the ignorant end of the shovel, you know.” As I said, outside of working on a book with Steve, I’m not sure what I’m doing. Geez, I haven’t yet completely decided which end really is the ignorant end of the shovel. So, if there’s anyone out there who wants to lend technical assistance to me while Steve is in Iraq, please jump right in. He might be a little busy.

I like the name Steve lent to our blog: Gunz Up. Guns Up is the title of a book written by Johnnie Clark, an M60 machine gunner during Vietnam. Aaron’s last Christmas home, he had me run him all over Lubbock so he could try and find it. He wanted to read it before he left on his second tour to Iraq. This left an impression on me. My non-reader son was chasing all around looking for a book! This had never happened before, save once.

When Aaron was in his early teens, he and his cousin, Zach, went on a trip with their church to Oklahoma City. The name was Youth for America or something close to that. I guess it must’ve been quite an experience for him. He came back on fire. At the gathering, they’d listened to heavy metal Christian bands, rocked out in mud pits of some kind (their real name escapes me just now, plus I’ve never rocked out in one, in or out of church), but anyway, he arrived home, a bandana covered his head and he sported a T-shirt that said, PRAY NAKED…and, Lord help me, I wish I could remember the verse that related to it, but that large, large, very large command, well, that’s all I can remember about that shirt. But I can remember the fire that burned within Aaron that day. Right away, he wanted to use the money he had left to buy Bibles for everyone he could think of. Dollar stores were new at that time, so I had to drive to Hobbs, twenty miles away, so that he could get the most bang for his buck. He’d heard they sold Bibles for a dollar each.

Later, out in the car, I couldn’t help but notice the disappointment that registered in his face when he tried to read print the size of punctuation. What a lethargic way for someone to make a buck.

Years passed, but not too many, not enough years for me anyway, and his body would once again arrrive in Oklahoma City. This time, in a cargo plane, commercial, out of Dover AFB, his covering, our flag. I have to believe his spirit was there with us as well that day, that day with his dad, his mom, his brother. He had to have known how devastated we would be, taking that final walk with him, that way. That way.

A few days later, I smiled into the eyes of one of his friends as she told me about going to a concert with Aaron. “Since it was a Christian concert, smoking wasn’t allowed, so Aaron jammed out and was sweating so hard that about 5 or 6 nicotine patches came off his back. I freaked out when I saw how many he had on," she said.

Everybody’s got an Aaron story.

Aaron went to a Pentecostal Church for a while in high school. I’ll never forget one lady. She stopped me in the middle of the meat aisle at Bob’s Supermarket and whispered to me, “He’s one of our best dancers!”

I can just picture him.

Gunz up, baby…and keep dancing.