Monday, February 11, 2013

31


I'm 31 today.  Which isn't a particularly remarkable birthday.  No grand new opportunities are open to me today that were unavailable 24 hours ago.  Although, I have been thinking a lot about being 31 in the last week.  The strangest thing about getting older, for me at least, is that I find myself older than a growing fraction of the population.  I'm older than the people in sitcoms, I'm older than people I work with, it is a strange feeling.

The hardest one for me to deal with is being older than the men and women I read about dying.  Dying for whatever reason but dying before your 31 is tragic regardless of the circumstances.  I feel like I'm just getting started, they never got the chance.

31 is a breakpoint in federal statistics about active duty military deaths.  It is a categorical break and seemingly a statistical one as well.  Going through the data available in the Defense Casualty Analysis System (https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/casualties.xhtml) it is easy to see that the majority of deaths occur in age groups younger than 31.

To date:
Operation Enduring Freedom, 1,642 men and women who never had a 31st birthday.
Operation New Dawn, 51 men and women who never had a 31st birthday.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, 3,481 men and women who never had a 31st birthday.

Totalling 5,174 men and women who willingly signed up and subsequently lost their lives before turning 31.

I come from a relatively small town.  My high school had about 2,000 students.  Double that, add a hundred or so.  Think back to the assemblies in the gym and how many people were there.  Now double that.

I don't mean to be a big downer here, the scale of military casualties over the last few years and the tragedy of their ages has just been weighing on my lately.

I guess my point here is that it's important to appreciate the people who willingly put themselves in harms way on days that we don't get off from work.  It's a profoundly brave thing to step up and serve.