Friday, April 18, 2003

By DAVID EPPS
Pastor

I awoke about 3 a.m. on that Sunday morning in the spring of 1970 and stumbled out of the bunk, searching for my clothes and boots.

I was used to getting up early, precisely at 5 a.m., or 0500 hours as they liked to say, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina. Of course, when one goes to bed at 9 p.m., getting up at 0500 still provides eight hours of sleep. Still, no matter how you looked at it, 0300 came early. "God isn't up yet," one recruit grumbled.

I was near the end of my boot camp experience and was on "mess duty" for a week. The Army called this detail "K.P.," or "kitchen police," but, whatever it was called, the week involved 16-18 hours a day, seven days a week, working in the kitchen, serving hundreds of Marine Corps recruits thousands of meals. It was hot, muggy, exhausting work. The two benefits were (1) we could eat whatever we wanted and (2) we didn't have to exercise or do the daily three-mile run while we were assigned to the mess hall. The downside was the utter and total exhaustion that came with each day.

That Sunday, for some reason, we had finished our first assignments early and the mess sergeant gave us a 15-minute break. Some of the recruits took the opportunity to lay their heads on the long folding tables and grab a quarter hour of sleep while others journeyed outside to have a cigarette.

I wandered off by myself to sit on top of the trash cans and watch the sun slowly come up over the waters in the East. It was a little after 5 a.m. and soon the first wave of recruits would be showing up at the mess hall for morning chow and would later be marched off to church. Church? I would miss church today, I thought, for the first time since arriving on the island.

And then I remembered it was Easter Sunday. For the first time since arriving at boot camp, I tried to think what my friends and family would be doing about now. Sleeping, of course, I realized, but soon they would be awaking and preparing to celebrate Easter Sunday. Most of my close friends that I had in high school, Steve Duncan, David Brewer, and others, all went to Mountain View United Methodist Church. In a few hours, they would be sitting in Mrs. Bridwell's Sunday School class and would later listen to the Easter sermon by the Rev. Fred Austin, one of the great influences of our lives. Another friend, Mike Brewer, was in the Marines and stationed somewhere in North Carolina.

My dad, mom, and 11-year-old brother Wayne would have breakfast together, most likely a wonderfully constructed Southern breakfast of milk (real milk, not the skim stuff I have to drink today), fried eggs, biscuits and gravy, and sausage or bacon, and would go off to Grandpa and Grandma Duckett's for a Sunday dinner, which is what we called "lunch" in those days. "Dinner" was actually "supper." It's a Southern thing. At least it was back before the corrupting influence of foreigners, "foreigners" being defined as anybody not from the South.

Easter Sunday, and I, having turned 19 a few short weeks ago, was sitting on a trash can by myself watching the sun come up over the bay while, in east Tennessee, my family and friends were carrying on without me, blissfully unaware that I was lonely, homesick, and miserable and only faintly aware that, across the world, the war in Vietnam raged. Truthfully, I didn't think about Vietnam either on that Easter Sunday morning. I thought only of my own loneliness and how much I wanted to be home. And then the break was over, we were called back to work, and I wouldn't have time to think of home for several more weeks.

This Easter Sunday, God willing, I will not be away from everyone I love and care about. I will be in church with good people and good friends, none of whom I knew in 1970. My older two sons and their families (I have six grandchildren now!) will be with us in church. It will be a glorious Easter Sunday.

But I will be aware of some empty seats in church. My youngest son, James, is away from home serving with the U. S. Air Force. Other young adults, some of them kids I watched become men and women, are also serving far from home. Annie Dalton is a Navy Corpsman in Japan. Donnie Tubbs and Dustin Ruth, both U. S. Marines now, are in the Pacific, I think in Japan or Okinawa, or maybe on a ship by now. Lukas Jones, a Navy Corpsman, who just got married, is serving in North Carolina. Anthony Thomson, whose National Guard unit was activated, is preparing to deploy to Southwest Asia (the politically correct term for "the Middle East"), and Maj. Cabot Gatlin, U. S. Army Special Forces, separated from his wife and daughter, is serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. I will miss them.

They, and hundreds of thousands like them, will watch the sun come up this Easter and think of home and friends and family. Many of them will fight the overwhelming loneliness and homesickness as they try to remain strong and fight the lump in the throat and the burning in their eyes. And then they will go back to work so the rest of us can remain free. God bless them and all who serve so far away this Easter season.

[David Epps is rector of Christ the King Charismatic Episcopal Church, located on Ga. Highway 34 between Peachtree City and Newnan. He may be contacted at FatherDavidEpps@aol.com or at www.CTKCEC.org.]

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