Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Over

by Aaron Johnson

Wish upon your star to behold your light.
Behold your joy again renewed.
Have and hold joy in living freely gifted you always and forever. Your life rang true as sunshine earth bound scattering to light the way before you.

To this soldier of heart, might, mind and strength. Live as ready proclamation carried by every standard bearer as found readily inscribed on the banners of your kind. Live to make right any discounting the names of those who served and who are gone. Live to ring true again as those toeing these stolid lines flowing red from the Senate’s ink wells as the wings of Phobos and Deimos encircling Mars.

Live to hold the record straight on their service. Live to speak their name aloud. Live for those missing among us. Live to speak on this service noble among the living and the sometimes dying. Live to speak these names now on record here at home for those returning. Live for those alive.

Speak for those who toed this imagined line somewhere, chalked on distant shores far from those they loved. Speak as a ping homeward bound regards those who bled, those who died and those continuing on in service. Live to speak their names aloud as a roll call to this kind still found numbered among the living and the brave. Live.

Aaron Johnson was a 91B airborne medic in the USAR and UTNG. He later joined the full time Navy during the Persian Gulf War. He was worried he’d miss out on the action of OIF/OEF, and became a contractor (2008 – 2010), flying in and out of both conflicts the equivalent of 6 times around the globe. He recently created the X-Alta Foundation to assist veterans.