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One More Casualty of US Wars
Richard L. Fricker
I knew Cody Young only in a peripheral way. He and my son were classmates and skateboard buds. My wife remembers he would come over for a homemade Orange Julius on hot summer days. Thus with great sadness, we learned of his death on May 21 in what Tulsa police are calling a standoff.
How did a young man, 22 years old, who once entertained dreams of being the next Tony Hawk become the target of a police kill shot? My son and many of Cody’s other friends recall him as a non-violent kid with a big kind heart. What happened? War happened! At least that’s part of the story.
The Tulsa Police Department says it responded to reports of someone shooting at parked cars from a second-floor apartment near 11th and Rockford Ave. at about 1 a.m. Nothing in the releases indicates that Young fired specifically at officers or anyone else, only that he had a long gun at the window. Reports vary as to whether the weapon was a rifle or shotgun.
But Cody’s life began to unravel in 2009, just before graduation from Thomas A. Edison High School when he joined the Oklahoma National Guard. Thomas Edison was known as a preparatory school but there was no way it could have prepared Cody for his future.
Cody was nine when Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda attacked New York City’s Trade Center and the Pentagon. A decade later, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were still going strong and it would be naïve to think that he didn’t know there was a good chance he would wind up in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But young men are prone to see themselves as immortal, impervious to injury and death. This sense of immortality is joined at the hip by a desire for adventure, or just doing something different to get out of town. So, Cody traded in his skate board for weapons of war. He became a soldier in the Oklahoma National Guard, the Thunderbirds, whose motto is “Always Ready, Always There.” The “there” in this case was Afghanistan.
The Oklahoma Thunderbirds have a proud combat tradition, fighting in many engagements in many wars. During World War Two, they were said to be the first guard unit into Europe and last unit out. Afghanistan would have its own deadly consequences.
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/one-casualty-us-wars/
