Heartbreak and Homecomings

This year, due to work and other scheduling issues, the Colorado branch of the family tree could not jet east from Colorado to the ancestral home here in the State of Concrete Gardens until Christmas morning.  Santa having completed his air travel before they commenced theirs, they found the skies to be not only relatively friendly but relatively free of traffic.  Their arrival, although at a time later than those of us here might have hoped, was a joyous occasion.  It was treated as such. 

Not every New Jersey family was as lucky as ours this Christmas.  We did not all get to celebrate a loved one's happy return to the ancestral home.  For some of us, the return was something significantly less than happy.  It was heartbreaking. 

Westwood, New Jersey is a town of approximately 10,000 people located in Bergen County.  In the past decade, it has lost two of its sons in the service of this nation.  Both were killed in action in Afghanistan.  An IED killed twenty-five-year-old Sgt. Christopher Hrbek, U.S.M.C., died on January 14, 2010, while Sgt. Hrbek was on patrol.  

Then, on December 23, 2019, Sgt. First Class Michael Goble, a fifteen-year-veteran of the United States Army and a member of its Green Berets since 2007, was killed in a roadside bombing in Afghanistan's Kunduz province.  Sgt. Goble was thirty-three.  He was less than a month away from completing his fourth and final combat tour in Afghanistan at the time he was killed.  Sgt. Goble and his girlfriend, Jen, have a six-year-old daughter, Zoey. 

Christmas is a day when the wreaths we hang should be green and not black.  It is a day when we hope to spend at least a bit of time with a person or persons we love most of all and who feels similarly about us.  It is a day when we do our level best to gather around us as many of those who we love.  Home is, after all, wherever our heart is.  

This Christmas, the family of Sgt. First Class Michael Goble endured a singularly heartbreaking homecoming.  On Christmas Day, Sgt. Goble's remains arrived in the United States on a flight that landed at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware.  

If life was a fair fight, then every Christmas tale would have a very happy ending.  It is not. Therefore, they do not.  Sometimes, such as in the case of Sgt. Goble's family (including six-year-old Zoey), the inequities seem particularly pronounced and the outcome seems especially unfair. 

-AK