Calculated Risk
Jul. 8th, 2010 07:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrIn just a few days my wife and I will embark on a vacation to France.
This will be her first visit to France, though not her first visit to Europe; she worked three weeks as a barmaid in London while she was in college. Seriously. But that's the extent of her Europe exposure.
I have never been to Europe. Or anywhere outside North America and the Caribbean. I've been one of those obsessive completists, trying to reach basically everywhere in the USA you can get with a car. (49 states down, most of the Canadian provinces too.) I suppose I can't put off venturing outside my comfort zone any longer.
So: I made my wife a promise many years ago that we would go to France before she turned 40. She turns 40 this October. Time to fulfill that promise, eh?
I'm not sure what it says about me, though, that as I look forward to things on the horizon I'm actually more excited about the upcoming Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure events I'm scheduled to participate in. When we get back from France we will immediately go to work serving as crew members for the Boston 3-Day. Then I'm scheduled to walk the Twin Cities 3-Day in Minneapolis/St. Paul in mid-August. Then I'm scheduled to walk the Washington, DC 3-Day in early October, revisiting the scene of my very first 3-Day in 2008. And then finally we'll both be walking the Tampa Bay 3-Day on Halloween weekend.
Tampa Bay means more to me than the rest in some respects because it'll be an opportunity for me to walk on what essentially might be called my ancestral soil. My mom's family has hailed from just north of Tampa, up in Hernando County, for generations and generations, and we often vacationed there when we were kids. Even today, living as I do in northern Vermont, land of ice, snow, maple syrup, and legendary fall foliage, I still feel very much at home whenever I take a Florida vacation. Tampa Bay can't come soon enough for me. "France?" I say. "Yeah, that'll be fun, but boy, how about Halloween, Florida, and the 3-Day all mixed together? That's gonna rock."
But yeah, France will be fun too. We're going to be in Paris for three nights, then travel up to Normandy for two nights, then return to Paris for three more nights, and then fly home.
Why Normandy? Why not just stay in Paris the whole time we're over there and attempt to eat a chocolate brioche at every patisserie within a thirty mile radius of the Arc de Triomphe? Or shop until we drop?
Simple: I respect commitment, bravery, heroism, and sacrifice. I respect the selfless dedication of those men who fought and died in World War II in order to free France and the rest of Europe from the tyranny of Naziism. I have an especially soft spot in my heart for the men from Bedford, Virginia -- not terribly far from my home town of Blacksburg -- who were in the first wave to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Members of the Virginia National Guard, fighting as members of the 116th Infantry Regiment, they landed precisely where they were supposed to at a spot arbitrarily marked "Dog Green" on invasion maps. The doors of their landing craft opened, and pre-sighted German machine guns opened up ... and within minutes the unit had taken 97% casualties.
19 of 30 "Bedford Boys" in Company A of the 116th died that day. 22 died in all during the Normandy invasion. You can imagine the turmoil at the Western Union telegraph office in the small community of Bedford when all the notification telegrams to families arrived on the same day, to say nothing of the incredible sorrow in the town when the news spread.
So yeah, while we're in France we're going to go to Normandy. We'll be staying in a little hotel in the seaside town of Vierville-sur-Mer. Right on Omaha Beach. Right on, as it happens, what was once known as "Dog Green". And we're going to go to the American cemetery at Coleville-sur-Mer, three miles east, to pay our respects to the thousands and thousands of men, the Bedford Boys among them, who never made it home.
Some people might say that it was sheer insanity for the men who charged into the surf on D-Day to have done so, knowing that most of them would be killed. But if they, the ones who fell and the ones who survived, hadn't been willing to take the risks, the world today would be a very different place.
General George S. Patton, commander of the Third Army in France, is buried among his men at another American cemetery in Europe, not the one in Normandy but rather one near the site of the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg. Even though his gravesite won't be on our itinerary as a result, as I think about risk and sacrifice I'm reminded of something he said:
"Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash."
D-Day was a calculated risk. It could have failed. The commitment and bravery of the men who took part saw to it that the lives lost in the effort were not in vain -- making the risk worthwhile.
At the same time, I celebrate and pay homage to the bravery of the members of the "Greatest Generation", I find myself wishing that there were more opportunities for people like, well, me to do great things. I didn't serve in the US military -- life took me in a different direction. While I derive a lot of satisfaction from the work I do for a living, I do feel, rather frequently, how pointless my life at times really is. Am I really making the world a better place by being in it?
And that question brings us full circle to why I'm a part of the Susan G. Komen 3-Day family. I've told the story several times before about how I got recruited by a friend to be in the 2008 DC walk after complaining about my life really counting for nothing... and as often happens to 3-Day people, I got kind of addicted to the whole doing-something-that-matters thing.
Breast cancer is as big a killer as they come. Certainly, we could all stand passively by and hope that Big Science will magically come along out of thin air and provide a cure, but anyone who has any experience at all in the clinical trial industry (and I happen to) knows how costly drug studies and trials are. The money raised by 3-Day walkers has already made a huge impact in many ways and it will continue to do so in the future ... PROVIDED that we all stick to the mission, keep spreading the word, keep awareness up, keep walking and fundraising, keep doing everything we can to keep the pressure up.
So please remember that, any 3-Day walkers who happen to read this, each time you come in from a training walk with blistered feet, sore hips, and shin splints. Please remember that the miles you pound on city pavement in 90-degree summer heat will pay off when your donors see you walking 60 miles in three days and pull out their checkbooks and credit cards in each subsequent year. What you're doing may seem at times like a rather pointless endeavor, especially when you got rained on, HARD, a mile from your house while out on an evening training walk, and then got splashed by passing cars. Or forgot your insect repellent and got enthusiastically snacked on by local mosquitoes. Or especially when you do a nine mile walk and come in hurting from that, thinking "how on EARTH am I going to do sixty miles?"
What you're doing is worth it. It's not a stupid, rash thing you're doing at all. You're taking a calculated risk, betting that if you go out and do everything you can to show that you care and that you're going to go the distance for the cause, your donors will stand up and act accordingly.
And they will.
You are doing something that matters. You are sacrificing, giving of yourself, and contributing to a fight against an enemy as bad as they come. Remember that when you're questioning whether it's all worth it.
That's why even as I head off to France on Monday, my thoughts will really be with my sisters and brothers of the 3-Day family. I can't wait to see all of you in Boston, the Twin Cities, Washington, and Tampa Bay. But, no matter where you walk, my thoughts will be with you.
Keep up the good fight.
This will be her first visit to France, though not her first visit to Europe; she worked three weeks as a barmaid in London while she was in college. Seriously. But that's the extent of her Europe exposure.
I have never been to Europe. Or anywhere outside North America and the Caribbean. I've been one of those obsessive completists, trying to reach basically everywhere in the USA you can get with a car. (49 states down, most of the Canadian provinces too.) I suppose I can't put off venturing outside my comfort zone any longer.
So: I made my wife a promise many years ago that we would go to France before she turned 40. She turns 40 this October. Time to fulfill that promise, eh?
I'm not sure what it says about me, though, that as I look forward to things on the horizon I'm actually more excited about the upcoming Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure events I'm scheduled to participate in. When we get back from France we will immediately go to work serving as crew members for the Boston 3-Day. Then I'm scheduled to walk the Twin Cities 3-Day in Minneapolis/St. Paul in mid-August. Then I'm scheduled to walk the Washington, DC 3-Day in early October, revisiting the scene of my very first 3-Day in 2008. And then finally we'll both be walking the Tampa Bay 3-Day on Halloween weekend.
Tampa Bay means more to me than the rest in some respects because it'll be an opportunity for me to walk on what essentially might be called my ancestral soil. My mom's family has hailed from just north of Tampa, up in Hernando County, for generations and generations, and we often vacationed there when we were kids. Even today, living as I do in northern Vermont, land of ice, snow, maple syrup, and legendary fall foliage, I still feel very much at home whenever I take a Florida vacation. Tampa Bay can't come soon enough for me. "France?" I say. "Yeah, that'll be fun, but boy, how about Halloween, Florida, and the 3-Day all mixed together? That's gonna rock."
But yeah, France will be fun too. We're going to be in Paris for three nights, then travel up to Normandy for two nights, then return to Paris for three more nights, and then fly home.
Why Normandy? Why not just stay in Paris the whole time we're over there and attempt to eat a chocolate brioche at every patisserie within a thirty mile radius of the Arc de Triomphe? Or shop until we drop?
Simple: I respect commitment, bravery, heroism, and sacrifice. I respect the selfless dedication of those men who fought and died in World War II in order to free France and the rest of Europe from the tyranny of Naziism. I have an especially soft spot in my heart for the men from Bedford, Virginia -- not terribly far from my home town of Blacksburg -- who were in the first wave to land at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Members of the Virginia National Guard, fighting as members of the 116th Infantry Regiment, they landed precisely where they were supposed to at a spot arbitrarily marked "Dog Green" on invasion maps. The doors of their landing craft opened, and pre-sighted German machine guns opened up ... and within minutes the unit had taken 97% casualties.
19 of 30 "Bedford Boys" in Company A of the 116th died that day. 22 died in all during the Normandy invasion. You can imagine the turmoil at the Western Union telegraph office in the small community of Bedford when all the notification telegrams to families arrived on the same day, to say nothing of the incredible sorrow in the town when the news spread.
So yeah, while we're in France we're going to go to Normandy. We'll be staying in a little hotel in the seaside town of Vierville-sur-Mer. Right on Omaha Beach. Right on, as it happens, what was once known as "Dog Green". And we're going to go to the American cemetery at Coleville-sur-Mer, three miles east, to pay our respects to the thousands and thousands of men, the Bedford Boys among them, who never made it home.
Some people might say that it was sheer insanity for the men who charged into the surf on D-Day to have done so, knowing that most of them would be killed. But if they, the ones who fell and the ones who survived, hadn't been willing to take the risks, the world today would be a very different place.
General George S. Patton, commander of the Third Army in France, is buried among his men at another American cemetery in Europe, not the one in Normandy but rather one near the site of the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg. Even though his gravesite won't be on our itinerary as a result, as I think about risk and sacrifice I'm reminded of something he said:
"Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash."
D-Day was a calculated risk. It could have failed. The commitment and bravery of the men who took part saw to it that the lives lost in the effort were not in vain -- making the risk worthwhile.
At the same time, I celebrate and pay homage to the bravery of the members of the "Greatest Generation", I find myself wishing that there were more opportunities for people like, well, me to do great things. I didn't serve in the US military -- life took me in a different direction. While I derive a lot of satisfaction from the work I do for a living, I do feel, rather frequently, how pointless my life at times really is. Am I really making the world a better place by being in it?
And that question brings us full circle to why I'm a part of the Susan G. Komen 3-Day family. I've told the story several times before about how I got recruited by a friend to be in the 2008 DC walk after complaining about my life really counting for nothing... and as often happens to 3-Day people, I got kind of addicted to the whole doing-something-that-matters thing.
Breast cancer is as big a killer as they come. Certainly, we could all stand passively by and hope that Big Science will magically come along out of thin air and provide a cure, but anyone who has any experience at all in the clinical trial industry (and I happen to) knows how costly drug studies and trials are. The money raised by 3-Day walkers has already made a huge impact in many ways and it will continue to do so in the future ... PROVIDED that we all stick to the mission, keep spreading the word, keep awareness up, keep walking and fundraising, keep doing everything we can to keep the pressure up.
So please remember that, any 3-Day walkers who happen to read this, each time you come in from a training walk with blistered feet, sore hips, and shin splints. Please remember that the miles you pound on city pavement in 90-degree summer heat will pay off when your donors see you walking 60 miles in three days and pull out their checkbooks and credit cards in each subsequent year. What you're doing may seem at times like a rather pointless endeavor, especially when you got rained on, HARD, a mile from your house while out on an evening training walk, and then got splashed by passing cars. Or forgot your insect repellent and got enthusiastically snacked on by local mosquitoes. Or especially when you do a nine mile walk and come in hurting from that, thinking "how on EARTH am I going to do sixty miles?"
What you're doing is worth it. It's not a stupid, rash thing you're doing at all. You're taking a calculated risk, betting that if you go out and do everything you can to show that you care and that you're going to go the distance for the cause, your donors will stand up and act accordingly.
And they will.
You are doing something that matters. You are sacrificing, giving of yourself, and contributing to a fight against an enemy as bad as they come. Remember that when you're questioning whether it's all worth it.
That's why even as I head off to France on Monday, my thoughts will really be with my sisters and brothers of the 3-Day family. I can't wait to see all of you in Boston, the Twin Cities, Washington, and Tampa Bay. But, no matter where you walk, my thoughts will be with you.
Keep up the good fight.
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Why We Fight
Date: 2010-07-08 11:11 pm (UTC)I'm one of the people who said that what the Bedford Boys did sounded like "sheer insanity." I couldn't understand what would make you face the hopeless odds of running up a beach into German machine gun fire. I knew that without the D-Day Invasion, the Allies wouldn't have defeated Hitler, but on an individual level, I couldn't understand where you would get the courage to do such a thing.
A few months ago, in preparation for our trip, Jay started us watching "Band of Brothers," the acclaimed docudrama series which followed a real company of World War II paratroopers from their training to the Normandy invasion through the end of the war. He wanted to help me understand the "sheer insanity" which I didn't comprehend.
It did help me begin to understand. I started to see some of the things that helped the troopers face the sheer terror of going into combat. Things like the bonds formed in training, which made you care about your teammates and want to protect them. Things like the shame of cowardice, and knowing you didn't want to be the one guy who couldn't face the fire, because then you'd never be able to face yourself.
We stopped watching "Band of Brothers" at the point in the series where the D-Day invasion was finished. The next few episodes were going to follow campaigns from France into places north and east, and both Jay and I knew I'd have trouble keeping track, and it would take away from both our enjoyment. I have a lot of trouble keeping track of place names and large casts of characters. Either I let go of the details, or I lose a lot of the flow while trying to keep track of them. (For example, you know "Oceans Eleven" and "Oceans Twelve"? I enjoyed both of them, but I couldn't tell you the plot if my life depended on it.)
A few weeks ago, to bring Normandy back to freshness in my mind, we watched "Saving Private Ryan." Real veterans of D-Day say that "Ryan" captured amazingly well the way it felt to land on Omaha Beach: the confusion, the noise, the terror, the desperate scramble to get sand beneath your boots; then the desperate dive below the bullets, and pulling yourself up the beach on your belly, hoping you wouldn't be hit by artillery, hoping the bullets would keep whooshing over your head.
I'd seen "Ryan" before, or at least most of it; but the last time I watched it, I was aloof from it. This time, with the context of "Band of Brothers" in my mind, I related to it much more closely. This time, I could imagine myself on that beach, in that madness of blood, sweat, and fire. This time, when one of Captain Miller's (Tom Hanks) team of eight soldiers was lost, I almost cried for him.
But "Saving Private Ryan" is about much more than the experience of the common soldier; it's also about the tragedy and, sometimes, meaninglessness of war. It leaves you wondering: What's it all about? Was it worth it? Was Ryan's life worth the sacrifice of so many? If you're trying to understand why each soldier's personal sacrifice is worthwhile and meaningful, "Saving Private Ryan" only leaves you more confused about the question.
(continued in comment-to-comment followup)
Why We Fight, continued
Date: 2010-07-08 11:15 pm (UTC)Then a few days ago... with Jay on one of his business trips... I sat down to watch something on the DVR, and, while surfing channels, discovered that "Band of Brothers" was playing; specifically, the episode "Why We Fight," one I hadn't already seen, because it took place near the end of the war.
In this episode, the unit discovers a concentration camp, abandoned by the German guards but still full of prisoners. Anyone who has seen pictures of them knows that concentration camps are the most horrible images of World War II; and anyone who has seen "Saving Private Ryan" knows that battle scenes, even horrible ones like Omaha Beach, don't even come close to being as horrible.
In "Band of Brothers," the horror was readable on the faces of the soldiers, seeing just what those prisoners had faced, day in and day out for years. It was obviously much worse than anything they'd seen in battle, and they'd seen a lot by that time. All of them were plainly very moved, and, just as plainly, knew why all the battles, all the pain and suffering they'd endured, had been worth it.
Which... once again... brings me back to the 3-Day. The name of this episode of "Band of Brothers" was "Why We Fight." At the 3-Day and on the 3-Day website, you often see declarations entitled "Why We Walk" or "Why I Walk." Almost every time you see that title, someone has written a personal tribute to a woman or man who fought breast cancer. Maybe she won the fight. Maybe she lost. Either way, the walker knows why she has to walk: because a loved one fought that terrible battle against cancer, and the walker wants to fight just as hard against that enemy, to help find a cure.
It's all a matter of perspective. Jay told me, after his first 3-Day, about rounding a corner and facing a big hill to climb, and how all the walkers groaned. But one woman, obviously a cancer survivor, looked at the hill and said, "It beats chemo," and headed up the hill. Perspective.
You look at your feet after a day of walking, and you've lost a few layers of skin to blisters. It looks terrible, but then you imagine what life feels like after a mastectomy, and suddenly, it's just a little skin. Perspective.
You give up days and days of summer relaxation, training to walk longer and longer distances. You give up hours to make calls and send emails, trying to raise the funds you need to enter the 3-Day. You give up a weekend to walk the 3-Day. And you do it because, if you don't do it, millions more people will give up YEARS of their lives to a terrible disease. A disease you can do something to stop.
That's the perspective that makes the 3-Day worthwhile. And that's why we walk.
Re: Why We Fight, continued
Date: 2010-07-09 04:22 am (UTC)Someday we'll meet I hope. Thank you so much for your post, both about your take on the battles and men in Normandy and the perspective we share on the 3-Day. I hope you have the time of your lives in France (Jay must have told you that I know Paris and other parts pretty well and wish I were going too!) and I wish you both good luck re weather, NO blisters, acceptable weather, etc., etc., on your 3-Day events this year.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 12:30 am (UTC)Gee, maybe because it's PARIS & full of PARISIANS?
Gee, there's a stupid question!
:-)
Seriously - have a safe trip, lots of fun.
& whatever you're going to do as a mark of
respect at Normandy, please do it for me, too.
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