LOVE ME WHEN I'M GONE
by
Robert Patrick Lewis
One of my favorite books of 2012 was actually a manuscript
of a novel slated for a 2013 release, but this military stunner made it to
press before the holiday and studios are already talking about a film.
In Love Me When I’mGone, retired Special Forces officer Staff Sergeant, (SSG) Robert Patrick
Lewis offers readers a golden ticket inside the exclusive world of U.S. Special
Forces training and operations, and the tightly-knit web of brothers—Renaissance
men with unequalled skill sets, operating in the most dangerous places and
situations on earth.
This is not a sugar and spice tale. It’s a
boots-on-the-ground, blood-sweat-and-tears soldier story, told with a soldier’s
tongue in authentic soldiers’ speak delivered with occasional profanity and
frequent military acronyms that draw readers into this elite society of
brothers. Lewis’s dialogue conveys the urgency, pain, and frustration of war.
It is a hard read emotionally, because most readers will have a face slap of
recognition that we are too removed from the men and women defending our rights
and privileges.
Lewis offers biographical glimpse behind the camouflage,
beginning with the circumstances and events that set him on the road to
military service. Put up for adoption at birth, he considers himself twice
blessed to have had birth parents who allowed him the chance to be raised in a
nurturing, adopted family with a deep military tradition. His father left the
Navy and tied his hopes to a newly formed airline called Southwest, which Lewis
regards as a second family. Despite all this support, Lewis lost his bearings
following the cancer death of his mother. To rein his flailing son in, his
father enrolled him in a military academy whose structure and rules put Lewis
back on course.
Lewis returned to public school his Sophomore year and met a
charming Asian coed named Cindy Chiu who secretly won his heart. After
graduation, the two went their separate ways with only brief interactions, and
then they lost contact for several years. Lewis was headed for a degree in
business when 9/11 happened, and he chose to enlist in the Army in the hopes of
becoming an Army Ranger. In Lewis’s own
words:
At
my fathers urging I enlisted in the delayed entry program, which would allow me
to finish out my college degree before leaving for Infantry basic training
(boot camp). Less than a month after I walked across the stage and took my
diploma from Texas State University in 2003, I was on a plane to Ft. Benning,
Georgia to learn how to be an Infantryman, then off to Airborne school, then to
Ft. Bragg, NC for Special Operations Prep and Conditioning (SOPC, the first of
many weed-out courses designed to convince the weak to leave of their own
accord), followed by Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) and the
beginning of my two years in the Special Forces Qualification Course (the SFQC
or, more commonly, the Q-course), being assessed and tested every single day on
whether or not I had what it took to serve my country as a Green Beret.
Lewis is quick to point out the
sacrifice families make when a soldier chooses the military as their vocation.
After years of no contact, Cindy Chiu found him through social media, and she
became his anchor, the person he dreamed of coming home to, the woman with whom
he dreamed of building a future. Love Me
When I’m Gone highlights the emotional toll separation and secrecy take on
these Special Forces’ loved ones.
I
still remember the day that I got her first message on MySpace; I returned from
SERE school the day before, and was still bruised, battered, emotionally
scarred and emaciated from spending a month as a POW in the North Carolina
woods. SERE is the Survival, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape portion of the Q-course, and it was the very last part of
my two-year journey of proving that I had what it took to wear the coveted
Green Beret.
Both
of my roommates were 18B’s, weapons specialists, Green Berets who can identify,
fix, rebuild, and operate any weapon in use anywhere in the world, had been
finished with the Q-course for several months.
I had been selected as an 18 Delta, Special Forces Medic, which, while
it is one of the most coveted positions in all of Special Operations, adds a
full year of medical training, testing, and hospital rotations to your duration
in the Q-course.
As
luck would have it, she had been searching for me all along as well. Her first email to me was about three pages
long, and after a week of exchanging messages on MySpace we graduated to all
night phone calls. It was just like we
were teenagers again, and night after night I would stay on the phone until
just hours before I had to get up to go to work, and I was constantly operating
on just a few hours of sleep.
It
was only a few weeks later that my orders finally came down: I was being
assigned to the elite 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces
Group in Germany, with the first unit of Green Berets that had ever
existed. It was the most bittersweet
news I ever received; I had been hoping and praying throughout my entire time
in the Q-course that I would get this assignment to Germany, where my
Grandfather had been stationed after WWII and my father had spent his formative
childhood years, but now that Cindy and I found each other again it meant that
our paths would once again separate. I
could hear the disappointment in her voice the day that I told her, and it made
my heart sink.
Lewis takes readers right into this
specialized world. It’s not all bullets and blood. Readers feel the toll
inertia takes on warriors who are far from home, living in a state of
readiness, but like race horses in the gate, tense as headlines and orders
collide, delaying their release and insertion into battle. They fill the days
with more training, repeating skills until actions are so instinctive they are,
as Lewis calls them, “muscle memory.”
I was most impressed by the
humanitarian work performed by these specialized peacekeepers, particularly by Special
Forces medics like Lewis, who set up clinics to treat citizens in remote
outposts, laboring to win the hearts and minds of people. Says Lewis in Love Me When
I'm Gone, “If you take care of a man, he will fight for you; take care of
his family, and he will die for you."
Love
Me When I’m Gone runs the full spectrum of
emotions. I cheered, felt my stomach knot, cried, and in truth, felt guilty
that I was so unaware of the price soldiers and their families were paying for
me, and for you. The combat scenes insert readers into the human drama, and the
drama is intense. You understand in a new way how an individual can love
another so much that he would take a bullet to save a friend. Again, in Lewis’s
words:
It
is something that cannot be explained or even understood until you’ve lived it;
a man can’t know or fully appreciate his life until he’s been close enough to
taste the end of it, and the bonds forged in battle are some of the strongest a
man could ever have. We are brothers,
the men of ODA 022, and though we didn’t have the same blood running through our
veins, we had all shed the blood of others together, and knew that none of us
would hesitate to step in the way of fate and take a round or jump on a grenade
to save one another.
After leaving Special Forces, Lewis
began writing down his experiences to help fill in the gaps for Cindy, and to
record them for his children. He consulted with his comrades to make sure he
was getting the details and places right, and they were so moved by the project
they encouraged him to turn it into a book so the misconceptions about Special
Forces soldiers would be cleared up, and so people would simply understand what
they were doing on that invisible line. It took time to get the manuscript
approved by the Pentagon, and now that the book is out, Lewis’s main hope is
two-fold: to provide strength to military spouses and families who suffer high
divorce rates, and to support Veteran's charities like USA Cares (for which
Lewis is a national spokesman) and The Special Operations Warrior Foundation.
Love
Me When I’m Gone should be read by every American adult. Lewis cleaned up
the language to make it a read parents could share with their teens with some
prior editing. Will it jar your sensibilities? You bet. Will it change you? I
hope so. We owe an incalculable debt to these heroes and their families, and
understanding their sacrifice is a first step to repaying it."Love Me When I'm Gone" is available in print format, ebook, and audiobook format. Readers can learn more about Robert Lewis, and the men of ODA 022 by visiting Rob's website at http://www.lovemewhenimgone.com/. http://www.lovemewhenimgone.com/
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