House of Eratosthenes

Robert Gilbert never opened it. He only touched the envelope when he needed to dust around it. He wanted to give it back to his son unopened.

Every time his Marine son was deployed, his son would ask, “You still got my letter?”

His dad never wanted to read what was inside an envelope marked: “Dad, open this if I am wounded. Love, Robert.”

The call to open it came March 8.

“Is Robert Gilbert there?” a voice from Marine headquarters in Quantico, Va., said.

“Junior or Senior?” Robert said.

“Senior.”

The father felt his stomach drop even before he heard the words: “Your son has been injured in Afghanistan.”

When he heard his son received “possibly a mortal wound,” he sat on the bed, opened the yellow envelope and pulled out four handwritten pages of spiral notebook paper.

I’m sorry if you’re reading this…

Hat tip to Cassy.

It is men like that allow me to maintain my optimism about the future of this nation.
- cylarz | 03/25/2010 @ 18:46
Wow. Father and son are both heroes. The reasons may be different but the heroics don’t differ in the least.

Semper Fi, Gunny Gilbert.
- bpenni | 03/25/2010 @ 20:57
Damn-it! So many good men dying to protect so many weasels at home.
- pdwalker | 03/25/2010 @ 22:36
Damn-it! So many good men dying to protect so many weasels at home.

Ain’t that the truth. Might as well replace “at home” with “in most of the Western world.” The citizens of the countries our military protects ( the military which we Americans fund with our tax dollars) seem to appreciate the sacrifices even less. They’re too busy sipping lattes at sidewalk cafes in Paris and waxing poetic, to care about our men fighting and dying, trying to quash terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq before they strike again in the US or Europe.
- cylarz | 03/25/2010 @ 23:22
You know, I hate starting a day off with a cry, especially one that is going to stay with me all day; Especially every time I hear some moron Lib complain about ‘threats’ today……
- tracycoyle | 03/26/2010 @ 05:36
Somebody commented over at Blackfive, where I originally saw this and commented, that he was the youngest Gunnery Sergeant EVER in the Marine Corps. You “civilians” might not be able to comprehend what that means but that is HUGE.

Semper Fidelis Gunny Gilbert, Semper Fi.
- tim | 03/26/2010 @ 08:15
See, the odd thing is, this is the sort of thing that makes me understand completely in my gut both “sides'” reaction to a tragedy like this. Because two incredibly strong impulses arise in me, mirror images of one another.

The one impulse is a powerful surge of humility: “The sacrifices made by families for the sake of something greater than they are is one of the things most worth honouring in human beings.”

And the other is an utter eruption of fury: “No father should have to say goodbye to his son like that, ever, anywhere; and we should be doing anything and everything we can to stop putting young men and women in harm’s way.”

It can sometimes be easy to mock the anti-war left as “bleeding hearts”, but we forget that sometimes, on some occasions, our hearts should bleed for what happens. We may still have to do what needs to be done, but the day we casually write off the price of those deeds is the day it stops being worth paying that price.
- Stephen J. | 03/28/2010 @ 20:52

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A Father’s Promise, a Son’s SacrificeThursday, March 25th, 2010

A Father’s Promise, a Son’s Sacrifice
Thursday, March 25th, 2010