Elmer Smith: Funeral for a soldier from a faraway war
PAUL ROBESON Jackson's immediate family sat within arm's reach of his flag-draped coffin. Scores of other family members and friends sat behind them in the center section of the Mount Olivet Tabernacle Baptist Church yesterday as drummers in African garb kept up a slow cadence on muffled drums.
PAUL ROBESON Jackson's immediate family sat within arm's reach of his flag-draped coffin.
Scores of other family members and friends sat behind them in the center section of the Mount Olivet Tabernacle Baptist Church yesterday as drummers in African garb kept up a slow cadence on muffled drums.
But my attention was drawn to the left, where about 100 soldiers in Class A uniforms sat silently. They had no part in the ceremony; they weren't among the speakers who took turns sharing their memories of "Robe," as Jackson, 33, was known to a loving family.
Row after row of fathers and sons were forced to confront the reality that their lives could end as suddenly and violently as their fallen comrade's had. It's a reality that few of us will ever have to face.
"Robe" had stared down death repeatedly. The short bio in the program said that he had survived 10 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But two weeks ago, he and three other soldiers were killed when their MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Leadville, Colo.
A spokesman for the Army's Special Operations Command said that Staff Sgts. Paul R. Jackson and Chad Tucker, and Chief Warrant Officers Robert Johnson and Terrance Geer had died while "conducting a routine mountain training mission."
That's not meant to sound callous. But you learn to talk that way when death is part of your daily routine.
I didn't know "Robe," although I had been acquainted with his mother, Maisha Jackson, and his brother Mpozi Tolbert, a photojournalist who died three years ago.
More than 5,000 men and women have died in combat or training for combat or from wounds suffered in combat in
Afghanistan and Iraq. I didn't know them either.
That's the problem. These are other people's sons and daughters.
Few of us have anything invested in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Few of us will ever be asked to make a sacrifice for this cause.
We have volunteers to do our fighting for us. Even the reservists and National Guard members who have been activated for duty in the Middle East are volunteers.
We don't see the daily procession of flag-draped coffins the way we did during the war in Vietnam. Our children will never have to become expatriates to avoid being drafted into a war they don't believe in.
Their wives and children won't be getting a letter telling them that their husbands and fathers have to spend an additional 52 days in the combat zone, as some families of paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne Division are being told this week.
It's easy to be an armchair patriot when somebody else is being shot at. War is an abstraction when the soldiers are the nameless, faceless families of others.
That's why I have been spending a few minutes a day on a Washington Post Web site called Faces of the Fallen, reading the short bios and looking at the pictures of soldiers who have died in the Middle East.
And it's why I called and asked Maisha Jackson if she would allow me to intrude on her son's funeral.
He left a wife, Keihaulauni, and a daughter, Desiree Imani, 8. He grew up in Mount Airy, graduated from the Walter B. Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences. He went to college at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
But there was a restlessness about him and a sense of adventure. He couldn't have been content behind a desk.
"He spent a summer fighting fires on the West Coast," his mother told me.
He asked for scuba lessons when he turned 14. She watched him qualify when he dove in a mountain quarry.
He was the third generation of men from his family to serve in combat and had a chest full of medals to show for it.
But he was just 33, and we will never know what we lost when that helicopter crashed.
We can't know. The mounting toll in human capital is incalculable.
There are 5,100 families counting their losses so far. At some point, we're going to have to assess this war in human terms, whether they are our children or not.
Send e-mail to
smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: