You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  There are three phases. The first, known as the Benning Phase, builds physical and mental endurance and forces soldiers to operate in the field under extremely difficult conditions. It includes a host of increasingly demanding physical tests like a twelve-mile march in full combat gear. To pass the water confidence test, soldiers must walk across a log thirty feet above the water and then crawl out on a suspended rope and drop thirty-five feet into Victory Pond. Then they must climb a sixty-foot-high tower and hold on to a pulley as it carries them down a two-hundred-foot cable known as the “slide for life” into the water. Moving in pairs, they must also crawl through, jump over, or slide past nearly two dozen obstacles on a densely wooded hillside to complete the dreaded Darby Queen obstacle course. It is also during the first phase that Ranger candidates are drilled in their ability to navigate during the day and at night. The second part of the course is known as the Mountain Phase, in which students must lead small units on ambushes and raids in the treacherous mountainous terrain of northern Georgia. George had one advantage in this phase over his fellow students: he had spent a couple of summers on a forestry crew cutting down trees in some of the same forests. The last part of the Ranger course is the Florida Phase, which introduces the most extreme mental and physical stress, when trainees have to plan and mount operations against a sophisticated foe on land, from the air, and using small boats.

  Many never make it through Ranger School. Indeed, nearly half of the officers and enlisted soldiers who start it fail to graduate, while only 25 percent who do complete the course do so with the same class they began with. The rest have to repeat one or more phases of the course before they pass.

  After one particularly tough day in the field in October, George had a few precious moments to rest. Sitting on the ground in the middle of the Chattahoochie Reservation, in rural Georgia, he scrawled a letter to his parents on the back of a map.

  “Things are going well enough,” he scribbled. “The only way I know what the days are is when I check my watch. The first week was the hardest of my life. But it’s not so bad now. We just don’t get any sleep.”

  He had no envelope, so he folded the letter, secured it inside the cardboard packaging for a field ration, and addressed it to his parents back in Tallahassee.

  Several weeks later, on Monday, November 24, with just twelve hours to go in Ranger School, George was tapped on the shoulder during a maneuver in the Florida swamps and told he was to report immediately to training headquarters. He hadn’t had a good meal in weeks and virtually no sleep. His mind began to race out of control. What had he done wrong? Where had he made a mistake? He couldn’t think of a single reason why he was being removed from the course. He was so close to the end, just hours away from completing the nine-week version of hell. He was stunned.

  As he sat alone in the small trailer that served as the command post, waiting to be informed of his fate, he was nearly delirious. His heart pounded, and he felt faint. Then, after what seemed an eternity, he saw something out of the corner of his eye that focused his mind like a laser. Approaching the trailer was a Florida Highway patrolman. With him was a chaplain. As the pair walked purposefully toward him, George studied the expressions on their faces. He felt a sharp pang and immediately thought of his mother. Something terrible must have happened to her, he was sure of it. But in a hushed whisper from the chaplain, he finally learned why he had been taken out of the field and brought here. His father had suffered a heart attack. Big George, only forty-nine years old, was dead.

  There were no tears at first. The state of shock that quickly set in was compounded by the physical and mental trauma he had already undergone in Ranger training. George simply couldn’t believe it. Big George had always seemed invincible to him. It all combined to put him into what could only be called a trance. George’s stepbrother, Scott, had seen to it that the state trooper was there to drive him home to Tallahassee, and George remembered very little of the nearly two-hour drive on Interstate 10 through the dead of night in the state police cruiser—only that he had no wallet with him and the patrolman was thoughtful enough to stop at a rest stop along the way and get him something to eat.

  It was the week of Thanksgiving. The holiday passed like a blur amid the family’s grief and preparations for the funeral, which was to be held the day after Thanksgiving. No college football was watched at the Eyster household, a first. It was just too painful without Big George. That evening, George met privately with the family’s pastor, who wanted his help in crafting the service. His father, he told him simply, as he fought back tears, had equipped him for life—from how to survive and prosper in the military to how to love and succeed in marriage.

  “He encouraged my faith,” George said of his father.

  He later sat alone in meditation with his father’s casket and read from Psalm 91:

  A thousand shall fall at thy side,

  And ten thousand at thy right hand;

  But it shall not come nigh thee.

  The funeral service was held at the Temple Baptist Church in Tallahassee. The pews were filled with longtime family friends, old Army buddies and neighbors, and the friends and colleagues Big George and Ann had met in his new career working for the Florida state government and hers at the restaurant association. The eulogy was delivered by Ann Wainwright, the deputy commissioner of the Florida Department of Agriculture, who had first met George and Ann when they were dating more than twenty-five years before.

  “He loved to serve. He thrived on it,” she recalled of a public servant who even after leaving the Army insisted on being referred to by his radio call sign, Pegasus 1. “In Greek mythology Pegasus was a legendary and mighty flying horse,” Wainwright intoned. “So was George. Sure-footed, strong, swift, and dependable.”

  She recalled something else about her friend and former colleague that she thought captured his essence. “You see, George came to the department after a brilliant career in the military. I remember on his official application in the space where you describe your past experience, George simply wrote: ‘Defending Our Country.’ ”

  The pastor recounted Big George’s dedication to his family, especially to Ann but also to his two stepchildren, whom he raised and loved as his own. His description of his relationship with his namesake was particularly poignant, extolling his “patience and willingness to encourage the young George, even when he was finding his way.”

  The life of the late lieutenant colonel George S. Eyster IV offered lessons for everyone who had come to bid him good-bye. For George those lessons now meant far more than he ever realized, one in particular. His father, the pastor said, “raised people’s expectations of themselves.”

  As if on cue, hours later George was presented with a new dilemma that tested his ability to live up to those words. He was informed that even though he had been a few hours from completing Ranger School when his father died, the Army wasn’t going to pass him. To earn his Ranger tab, he would have to complete the last thirty days of the training course again. He felt as if he had been hit while he was down, and disbelief quickly turned to anger.

  “Who needs this? I just won’t do it,” he told one of his Army buddies.

  As the only George S. Eyster left, George now found himself the recipient of a growing collection of family heirlooms. When it wasn’t Ann, it was Grandma Harriet who made sure of that. Each time he visited her, he left with another artifact to remind him who he was—of the name he was now steward of. He also hit upon a convenient way to explain to those who were inevitably curious about what it felt like to come from such an illustrious military family. It was a line from a popular movie that nearly everyone understood and usually put to rest a subject he had never felt comfortable with, let alone talking about.

  “I have a Lieutenant Dan complex,” he quipped when asked by his fellow officers or acquaintances who discovered his pedigree. He was referring to the character in the popular novel and motion picture Forrest Gump who hailed from a long line of battle
field heroes and was singularly focused on living up to the glory of his name.

  What George didn’t say, however, was that unlike the fictional character, who was obsessed with dying in battle as his forefathers did, he had been decidedly wary of the family business from the start.

  Now he was surrounded by that history. He had the desk plate that his great-grandfather used during World War II, along with the textbooks that General Eyster used as a cadet at West Point and his metal rod pointing stick. Other relics of the Eyster line he inherited from Grandma Harriet or were bequeathed to him by his late father included a more-than-hundred-year-old solid-gold pocket watch with twenty-seven ruby jewels, a German Nazi sword, and a nearly priceless cherrywood grandfather clock. One of the most mysterious items was an ornate saber and scabbard of a 32nd degree Freemason, which had been passed down through the generations after the Civil War.

  Before long, there were sheaves of old letters and faded postcards penned by his forebears and military records he had never seen before. One of the first he inherited was a copy of a letter that Grandpa George had written to a fellow officer a little more than two weeks before he was killed in Vietnam. The three-page typewritten message included detailed advice for other units that were heading into the war zone—down to how much salt, sugar, baking soda, and extra nails to bring. George learned it was later put on display in the West Point Museum as a classic example of one officer taking the time on the battlefield to counsel another back home who would soon be following him into combat. The copy George was given was still in the envelope from when Grandma Harriet had given it to his father.

  There were also letters from Grandpa George to George’s father that offered new insights into a relationship that Big George was so reluctant to speak about. One written from Vietnam a few months before his death provided a peek into the pressure that George’s father must have felt to carry on the family tradition.

  “Things go pretty well here—we’ve killed a lot of Vietcong at the expense of 12 of our own plus 87 wounded,” Grandpa George reported.

  Yet the bulk of the two-page handwritten letter dated November 30, 1965, was about his expectations for his son’s future.

  “I wish you all the success in the world in getting to” West Point, Grandpa George wrote, before adding, “if that is what you want to do.… You will also hear from the Army on the four year ROTC scholarships but they are only good if you have been accepted by a college that offers four year ROTC. So be sure you apply to one or more that meet this requirement,” he instructed.

  The letter, which would be the last that George’s dad would receive from his father, was almost completely lacking in feeling, save for the final sentence.

  “Much love son,” Grandpa George wrote. “Take care and have fun. Devotedly, Pop.”

  These were some of the raw materials that had built and sustained the George S. Eyster legend. But George wasn’t ready to digest it all. He was trying his best to catch up with the parts of the story that he already knew. Indeed, most of the letters, news clippings, and other items he was now the custodian of filled up a box that he stashed away in a closet.

  For the next two years George sought, with mixed success, to write his own chapter in the saga. But his rightful place in it remained elusive. In some ways he found being in the Army even more difficult than agonizing over whether to don the uniform in the first place. He struggled to achieve a level of professional satisfaction—a search that would soon exact a high price in his personal life.

  Despite his resentment at how the Army treated him, after some soul-searching George reluctantly agreed to repeat the most grueling phase of the Ranger course. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of not wearing the Ranger tab after coming so close. Then, when he went off to Fort Bragg to command his first platoon, Viv came with him. She had studied to be a schoolteacher, planning on a career that she thought would befit a future Army wife likely to have to move every few years.

  But before long, it became increasingly clear the rootless existence, the foreign culture, and the long stretches that George was away for training just weren’t for her. They fought a lot and steadily grew apart. It came to a head when George was selected to participate in an elite training exercise in Belgium. He didn’t have to go, and she didn’t want him to. He insisted that it was important for advancement in the fiercely competitive officer corps. The day of his departure they had a heated argument. In a flash of anger and frustration, George told Viv it might be a good idea if she wasn’t there when he returned.

  As soon as he boarded the flight to Europe, George regretted it and the way he had treated her. But despite his repeated entreaties over the phone when he arrived, it was too late. When he got back, Viv was gone. The truth was hard to swallow, but George knew he had chosen the Army over the woman he loved and believed he would marry.

  After Viv left, George grew even closer to his mother. Following her husband’s sudden death, Ann had been in deep mourning, her loneliness brightened by very few things. George’s familiar greeting of “hey, pretty lady” was one of them. On Fridays he often made the nearly six-hundred-mile trip down Interstate 95 to spend Saturday with her in Tallahassee before heading back on Sunday in time for duty on Monday.

  Then, in the spring of 1999, a series of events forced George to take stock of what he was doing with his life. The first occurred one morning in March when his platoon was out on maneuvers at Range 77 at Fort Bragg. Asleep in his tent, George was startled awake by the loud report of a weapon followed by the shuffling of feet. One of his soldiers, Wayne Gajadhar, a twenty-year-old specialist from Columbia, South Carolina, had been on duty the night before guarding the ammunition. After daybreak, he walked behind a shed, just steps away from the forty or so of his fellow soldiers asleep in their tents, inserted a bullet into the magazine of his M4 carbine, placed the barrel of the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He apparently pilfered a single round.

  The incident, as well as the effect it had on his men for months afterward, was a defining moment for George as an officer. He had cared for Gajadhar a great deal. In fact, he was one of his favorite paratroopers and singled out by the company commander twice for Trooper of the Month. George had big plans for the young soldier and was going to recommend him for Ranger School. George thought he had known the kid but realized he didn’t know a thing about him, really. The suicide was a painful blow, both personally and professionally.

  Then, later that summer, George’s platoon was conducting a parachute jump at Camp McCall, a nearby practice range. They jumped out of a C-130 cargo plane into low and heavy clouds. As he descended quickly toward the ground, he saw a Humvee directly in his path. Trying to maneuver out of the way, he lost control and landed on his backside. He was knocked unconscious. When he came to, he was in agonizing pain. He had broken his tailbone and suffered a ruptured disk in his lower back. Meanwhile, his first sergeant broke both his ankles, while a fellow lieutenant broke his pelvis. Other troops were badly hurt.

  George was informed by the Army docs that his parachute-jumping days were probably over and his back was likely to be a long-term problem. A few months later, still grappling with the pain from his injuries, he was out on a field maneuver one morning when he awoke wet and cold in his tent. He rolled over stiffly and muttered to the soldier next to him, “This sucks.”

  Just then, as he poked his head out at the gray dawn, he saw a pair of Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters zip by overhead.

  “I could do that,” he thought.

  George hadn’t informed his superiors at Fort Bragg when he decided to send his paperwork to an old friend of his father’s in the Pentagon who offered to help him get into flight school. His request was finally approved in the late summer of 2000 as George was completing the Eighty-Second Airborne Division’s annual training rotation in California’s Mojave Desert, where the Army prepared its combat units for full-scale war. A blazing sun beat down on the arid terrain, and George dripped with sweat in h
is full battle gear in the back of a cramped and dusty Bradley Fighting Vehicle. His platoon was in the middle of a maneuver, with dozens of Bradleys spread out across the vast desert plain, when he was pulled away from the action. One of his commanders glared at him from beneath his helmet. He brusquely informed George that his request for a branch transfer had been approved. He was no longer an infantryman. He was now officially an aviator.

  As he stood there sheepishly, George was curtly reminded that he still had a platoon to lead and was expected to complete the exercise. George did as ordered, but he couldn’t help but smile at the thought that he must be the only “aviator” in the Army leading an infantry platoon. Also, for the first time since Dad died, he was excited, filled with anticipation, if a little bit nervous about what he had gotten into.

  He didn’t fully appreciate it until much later, but he was now following in his father’s footsteps in a different way. George’s father had also originally been an infantry officer and had once told him that he had decided to transfer to aviation later in his career after he looked at the talent field around him and knew he couldn’t compete with many of his fellow infantry officers. George, too, now felt that he couldn’t keep up with the gazelles of the infantry branch, whose physical demands were never-ending. He also remembered his father telling him that flying was more cerebral, a thinking man’s pursuit. The problems an infantry officer had to solve mostly got bigger but didn’t change much. It had stung when Big George once told him that his strengths might be better suited for the infantry. It was time to prove him wrong.

  George was older and more experienced than the other cadets when he arrived at the Army Aviation School at Fort Rucker in Alabama. He had been an infantry platoon leader for more than two years. His classmates were fresh out of West Point, ROTC, or officer candidate school, while a few others were specially selected enlisted soldiers known as warrant officers. At first his instructors didn’t quite know what to do with him, but his maturity was apparent. They decided to appoint him class leader.