Facta Non Verba

By Elaine Little

In your mind, gyrating butts punctuate the run-up to the Iraq War because you often sat in the TV room at the Richard L. Jones Armory in Chicago waiting to be assigned to a funeral honors detail, and BET was the channel of choice.

The funerals all had two things in common all were veterans, all were strangers. Before you left for the day’s funeral, you were given a location, a partner, a car and printed-out MapQuest directions. You tried to leave as early as possible. But, despite the fact we were service members who presumably were map-literate, we often got lost.

It was good money for a National Guard member with no day job. You were paid whether you got sent to a funeral or not. The Armory was a weird gothic and art deco mash-up. Elaborate carvings embellished the outside of the building: medieval knight; WWI doughboy; Native American warrior. Deeds, Not Words in Latin etched into stone.

Inside, towering windows shot up walls decorated with an arrowhead pattern, stopping just short of neo-gothic-inspired molding. A wood-beamed ceiling loomed. Sturdy metal light fixtures with decorative sunbursts dotted the grand hall. The kind of building you looked at and thought: They sure don't make 'em like that anymore.

The building had served as headquarters for many military units. One of the most famous was the Fighting Eighth, the nation's first all-Black National Guard unit established in 1898 to fight in the Spanish-American War. During World War II, the Armory even processed uranium for the Manhattan Project. Entering the building was like inhaling history and perhaps radium. (Naturally, they claimed it had been eradicated).

The city rented it out for fancy events. One evening a wealthy Chicago philanthropist threw a bash. The following day you walked out onto an armory floor strewn with orchids.

By February 2003, jiggling BET butts had been replaced by CNN. We were serious now, you thought. But the pretense of soberly relating the news was gone. This news was kind of exhilarating. It was bright, noisy and delivered breathlessly. Service members were heroes before they'd even entered the fray. And if there was a chance you might be going, it seemed even more exciting.

But for now, you were part of the funeral honors detail. You practiced flag folding the most because that seemed the easiest thing to fumble. You were folding a new flag. It wasn't going to fold easily like the flag you used for practice, where the folds were pressed into the soft material, worn from years of use. It was challenging to take the new stiff fabric and mold it into a tight triangular bundle suitable for presentation to the survivors. After that, the flag was usually retired forever folded within a wood and glass triangular flag case.

Many rules on flag etiquette centered on an almost mystical relationship between you and the flag—

Don't let it touch the ground!

Heavy censure if you didn't treat it right. Some people even believed the flag was not protected enough already, and new amendments needed to be crafted to ensure its proper place as part of a privileged class. Respect had to be paid carefully in a certain way. Hand on heart. But only if you were in civilian clothes. If you were outside in uniform, you stood and saluted. Some of these rules made you nervous. What if you accidentally dropped the flag on the ground and nobody saw? Upon further research you discovered the warning about the flag touching the ground was practical. If the flag became trampled or dirty it wouldn’t be suitable for display and had to be burned. But if it could be salvaged with a machine wash it could live to fly another day.

Funeral honors detail wasn't a seamless operation. In fact, it was a bit haphazard. The crabby guy you were partnered with complained about your lousy flag-folding skills. There was no bugle player, so a CD on a boombox sufficed. The CD sometimes skipped, interrupting the somber service. But nobody ever suggested getting a new one. Most mourners, however, didn’t notice our missteps. They were kind and quiet, attending to their grief. The deaths were primarily men of a certain age—routine deaths. Sometimes the bereaved discussed going out to brunch afterward.

This was before everyone had a cell phone. There was no GPS app. If you were late. You were late. Scrambling out of the car with shitty apologies, clutching the boom box and flag. Most funeral honors detail personnel lived in Chicago or a surrounding suburb. A detail to Wisconsin or a tiny Illinois town named after a decimated Native American tribe was a tricky proposition. You looked at the address and wondered, Where the hell is this?! Supposedly, MapQuest was our friend. But it frequently let us down.

One time, we were tasked with a funeral detail in a sleepy Wisconsin town but failed to judge how long it would take to make the drive. When we arrived, the coffin was already in the ground. Nasty stares greeted us. We had no excuse and just stood there like a couple of dummies in wrinkled Class A uniforms. We're sorry, we kept saying. The embarrassed apologies fell on deaf ears. There would be no funeral honors. The man's relatives were understandably pissed. Another time we witnessed a biker funeral. Tricked-out motorcycles lined the road leading up to the gravesite. Everyone was dressed in jeans and black T-shirts. Mourners gathered around the coffin; one guy never put down his Big Gulp. Throughout the whole service, he clutched that cup like a security blanket and maybe it was.

With the Iraq war heating up, you were often asked during the downtime after the service: So… you think you guys will get deployed? We shrugged it off. What? The National Guard? Why would we be sent before active duty troops?

But then again there were advantages to being deployed. everyone knew about combat pay, COLA (cost of living allowance), and family separation pay. Sometimes it was even about the Army providing you with a excellent excuse to escape from your circumstances. Sanctioned running away, so to speak. Sure enough, one year later, you were in Afghanistan.

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Army Veteran Elaine Little deployed to Cuba, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. Her publishing credits include Proud to Be Volumes 10 and 11, Consequence Forum, The War Horse, and the upcoming anthology, Sisters in Arms, published by Blue Dragon Press. In March, her work, Bitter Tea was read by the actor, Sharon Stone at “Honor in their Words,” an event held at Hollywood Legion Post 43 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.