My friend, Danny, passed away a little while back.
On Saturday, I attended his memorial service. I expressed my condolences to his children and brother and said goodbye to my friend.
On the long drive home, I thought about the one million memories we built together in the years we spent as friends. I thought about how our plan to visit our Scout camp on Alumni Day this summer would no longer happen. And I thought how much the world has lost with Danny’s passing.
Here’s another story about Danny.
Summer of 1986. Band camp. A whole week away from home as we prepare for the coming season of competition. Our marching band is serious business. In my six years in the band as a member of the drum corp (our high school included grades 7-12), we win six Massachusetts (MICA) state titles and two New England (NESBA) championships. We march in the Macy’s Day Parade, the Rose Bowl, and down Main Street at Disneyland.
Our school doesn’t yet have a football team or a football field. We are a marching band that performs halftime show routines without a halftime. We practice in a parking lot painted with the lines of a football field.
It strikes me as bizarre today, but in the 1980s, insulated by our small town, it seemed normal.
As we load our drums into the back of the band’s purple school bus at the end of practice, our band teacher starts the bus, causing its ancient engine to backfire.
One of our classmates, a member of our drum corps and our Scout troop, is leaning against the tailpipe of the bus as this happens. The heat and flame that erupt from the tailpipe blow a hole into his leg.
I’m peeing behind a building beside a fellow drummer named Greg when it happens. We hear a bang that sounds like a gunshot and then screams. A moment later, one of our classmates sprints past us.
We don’t know it, but she’s running for a phone, which is far away.
The wound is horrific, but because of the heat involved, it’s also been cauterized, so it’s not bleeding very much.
Panic had ensued. Most of the students are sent back to the mess hall. Danny and I stay behind. We know this boy well from both band and Scouts and oddly, we are two of the most equipped people to handle the situation.
Our Scout troop, run by Danny’s father, wins every competition we enter. The annual Klondike Derby and Chuckwagon Derby. Tug of war at Scout camp. First aid marathons. Knot tying contests. Fire starting races.
Danny’s father has drilled us relentlessly, and we are a troop of boys who cannot be defeated. In the words of my brother, who was also a Boy Scout at the time, “It kind of got boring winning everything.”
Standing alongside Danny and me are my drum corp captain, Tommy, and a handful of adults. One of the adults wants to put a tourniquet on the injured boy, but Danny and I know that is a mistake. He’s not bleeding badly. It’s not necessary, and it could make things worse. The adult insists on a tourniquet.
Danny and I stand between the adult and the boy, explaining why it can’t happen.
Eventually. the adults listen to us.
Instead, we take my shirt – a tee shirt emblazoned with the Worcester Polytechnical Institute logo that I had won the previous spring for faking a science project, making it to the state competition at the college, and earning an honorable mention – and wrap it around the wound lightly.
We treat the boy for shock by elevating his head and legs. We give him water.
The ambulance arrives. Paramedics place the boy inside, along with two band directors and my drum corps captain. The third band director drives the bus back. Danny and I make the long walk back to the mess hall.
We don’t say much for the walk. I’m shirtless now in the fading sun. Danny has blood on his shirt.
As the mess hall comes into view, students await the news. In a few moments, we will be inundated with questions. Before they reach us, I tell Danny that his father would’ve been proud of us today. We had spent years learning first aid, thinking our skills and knowledge would be used to defeat other Scout troops in competitions, never really understanding that it might be put to practical use someday.
Danny points out how calm we were when the adults were not. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he’s right. Danny, in fact, was the calmest of all. He actually calmed me when I felt panic rising by telling me to sit down beside the boy and talk to him.
We didn’t save the boy’s life. Had that tourniquet been put on his leg, no damage would likely been done. Even treating for shock probably did little as the ambulance soon arrived.
We didn’t do much that day, but we knew what to do and how to do it, and we knew the importance of things like assessing the situation, staying calm, making rational decisions, and preventing harm.
Danny knew all of those things best of all.
I was right that day. His father would’ve been proud.
