A Memorial to Captain Drew Jensen, United States Army

On Friday last America lost one of its most precious sons, one of its most gallant warriors. On that day West Point graduate Captain Drew Jensen of Damascus, Oregon died of complications from a gunshot wound to the neck suffered on 7 May 07 in Baqubah, Iraq. For four long and arduous months Captain Jensen and his loving family struggled valiantly against long odds. The struggle ended at 3:45 pm on 7 September 07.

I only knew Captain Jensen for one minute when we briefly met in the ICU at Walter Reed. We were passing out gifts to the wounded there. When we entered Drew’s room we had no idea of the extent of his injuries. We presented some gifts, talked briefly to his wife, Stacia, and to his father-in-law. Drew had a breathing tube and was sedated but still managed a barely audible reply to our wishes and thanks. Then we left the room. His arms and legs had never moved. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

When the nurse told us of the extent of his injury my knees buckled. Prince Leopold d’Arenberg, a donor to our charity who was with us that day, was visibly shaken. Other members of our party choked back tears. All the other ICU patients had been alert, some even cheerful, even those with missing limbs. Not so Drew.

Captain Jensen was transferred to the Spinal Chord Injury (SCI) Unit of the Puget Sound VA Medical Center in Seattle. His wife was with him constantly, as she had been since his evacuation to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. She would give us reports of his progress. We agreed that we would donate a check to the SCI in his name to help the families of other wounded soldiers there. As a professional soldier, despite his egregious wounds, one of Captain Jensen’s last requests was for help to soldiers he probably didn’t even know. A little bit of us all died with Drew Jensen. We lost a little bit of the divine essence of our national character in that fine man. Yet others will rise to take his place, and others after them, and then others again.

Where do we get such men? Where do those qualities of the good and noble arise in America to produce such an embodiment of our most precious qualities of sacrifice, loyalty, bravery and patriotism? It wasn’t at West Point. As powerfully transforming as that great institution may be, it merely offered the opportunity for the full manifestation of those latent qualities of character forged at the dinner tables, church pews, classrooms and firesides of middle-America. It is the distillation of those qualities in the cauldron of war which makes these men and women so different from the rest of us, so much the best part of us. We are shamed by their sacrifice, by their fierce loyalties, by their stoic acceptance of unimaginable hardship.

So they serve, and endure, and persevere and suffer – nameless and invisible to the wider world whose safety is their constant gift. Indifferent to public praise and private fortune, they carry the banner of civilization to foreign shores, and there, on some wind-swept, boulder-strewn parapet on the edge of chaos and barbarism they plant that banner. Standing there, they turn and call to us in words that echo down through the ages – “Sleep soundly,” they say, “Sleep soundly because no one will hurt you tonight.”