Dustin Grella: A Meditation


This morning I walked past a church with a sign out front that read, “Prayers for Peace.” Stretching the entire length of the church was a wrought iron fence with long thin yellow ribbons draped across. They looked like ties on a clearance rack.

I noticed that some of the ribbons had nametags attached. As I walked down the sidewalk I thought the ribbons must be for donors or sponsors or patrons of the church. It was one of those beautiful old stone churches on Fifth Avenue.

The front of the church was long and the ribbons were many and bright yellow and dancing in the December wind, so they easily kept my attention. I read another nametag. This one was of a soldier; the third, also of a soldier. That was when I realized that these must all be names of soldiers; soldiers who had died in Iraq. Thus the yellow ribbons; thus the prayers for peace. I stopped. I started searching for PFC Devin J. Grella.

There were thousands of ribbons. I wasn’t going to be able to just randomly find his, but then I saw that they were in a sort of ad hoc alphabetical order Greka, Gonzalez, and after a long while, Grella.

A heavy cold wind blew through me, tossing the ribbons high off of the fence. I cried. I don’t think of him that often anymore, even though it has only been three years. Even though someone in Iraq was just killed yesterday, someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s friend. I miss him. I wish I could say I think of him more than I do.

I wiped the tears from my face and started walking back down Fifth Avenue, crossing through Madison Square Park. I thought immediately of the sound byte on the laptop when his clothes and personal belongings were returned. I thought about that sound file, guns firing in the background, his innocent twenty-one year old voice, oddly more mature since he’d left for Iraq, three months ago. An IED would be detonated beneath his diesel tanker days later, killing him instantly.

I can remember when our family got the laptop out of his personal effects. We were in the funeral home, closed casket wrapped tightly with a flag on the other side of the room. We all huddled around the monitor, as if we were looking into a crystal ball that could deliver a message from beyond the grave. There they were, pictures of Devin and his friends, videos of soldiers in a sporting boxing match, and a sound file of him delivering a tanker of fuel across a Persian desert. We listened to it over and over. We cried. We wanted to know, to be a part of, experience what his life (a life that we all knew so well before he’d left for Iraq) was like those last few months.

We knew that he was somewhere, but it wasn’t until we heard the machine gun fire in the background that we realized he had been off in a very foreign place. Maybe before that we didn’t want to know. Maybe we were in denial. It definitely made it easier to sleep at night.

At that moment, gathered around, listening to his voice, I tried to imagine Devin as something I’d never considered him, a soldier. I knew him as a little brother, an athlete and a sports fanatic, a musician, slightly girl crazed and able to spend hours gaming, but never as a soldier.

He’d only been there three months, hardly enough time to write back home. He’d only been in the army for six months, and honestly, I’d never really spoken to him about it. It wasn’t how I identified him. But here, at the funeral were hundreds of men, dressed in uniforms, straightening collars, and saying what a brave solider my brother was. And there I was, keeping my mouth shut, for fear of dishonoring him.