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February 20, 2003'It'll be OK,' 'Good luck' ring hollowBy KATHY GIBBONSRecord-Eagle features editor It was an e-mail from a friend here in Traverse City, forwarded to everyone on his address list and seeming to be one of those stories that makes the rounds on the Internet. But it wasn't. Written by a friend of his in New York, it was titled "One Man's Life in Three Phone Calls." The author is a young woman who lives in New York and the story was about an experience on the subway. Earlier that day, she had found herself sitting next to a man about her age who was clutching a bundle of official-looking papers. He stared at the papers a long time before making three calls on his cell phone. The first was to his mother, telling her he was shipping out: "Tomorrow. Report to base. Texas. And then Turkey. Then Saudi." He reassured her that all would be OK, and hung up. The second was to his girlfriend, saying they would have to postpone their wedding: "You know ... I want to marry you. I got called up. Saudi, mainly. Listen, don't cry. It'll be OK." Visibly shaken now, he dialed again, this time phoning a friend: "Got called up, man. Tomorrow. Saudi. You free after work? Meet me at Jimmy's." The young woman wrote: "He had to call his mother and tell her that her baby was going overseas. He had to call his girlfriend and tell her they'd have to postpone the wedding. And lastly, he called his buddy. "As I got off the train, I looked at him and said, 'Good luck, man.' Quietly he said, 'Thanks.' " I phoned the woman who wrote it. Her name is Krissa Cavouras, she's 22 and works for a magazine on Broadway. "When I was sitting next to him and listening to those conversations it didn't occur to me until later the implications of it...I thought, wow, he's going to war," she said. It hit her deeply because for one, he's near her age, around 24. Also, her dad worked for an oil company so she spent a lot of her growing-up years moving. She met plenty of "military brats" along the way and in high school in Texas knew people who were going into the service or in the reserves. But she's been in the northeast since college and said there aren't many people in the military in her circle of friends these days. "It was kind of shocking ... to be listening to that conversation and understanding so much about this guy's life in 10 minutes," she said. "What struck me was that compared to him, I know nothing, I'm not going there." She's not sure if she's for or against the idea of the war, but had to let him know that she had heard him talking and was moved. "I didn't think I could do the classic New York thing and listen to his conversations and walk away. 'Good luck' is sort of an asinine thing to say," she said, adding that what she wanted to say to this brave stranger was "Thank you for being who you are, and for not being my brother." "I don't know him," she said, "but I owe something to him and I owe something to people like him." Don't we all.
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