‘Last journey’: A father finishes what his son started - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

‘Last journey’: A father finishes what his son started

Darrell Griffin Sr. and his son, Darrell “Skip” Griffin Jr., agreed to co-write a book of philosophical conversations when Skip first deployed to Iraq in 2004. They wrote until Skip was killed in Baghdad on his second tour in 2007.

Griffin Sr. has gone to great lengths to finish the task on his own. Using Skip’s e-mail, letters and journals, he tells his son’s unvarnished personal story. He reports and interviews from the ground where Skip walked in Iraq — Griffin’s “last journey” there — in order to reconstruct his son’s combat experiences.

The result is a no-frills picture of a soldier-son who went from being a National Guard dropout with a history of running away to a respected Army staff sergeant decorated for valor. Dad has done his son — and parenting — proud.

Skip was a “scholar and intellectual. Sometimes soldiers can lose sight of how different our culture is compared to that of Iraq, but not when SSG Griffin was nearby,” says platoon leader 1st Lt. Gregory Weber.

Capt. Christopher Bachl agrees: Skip was “well-read, better than most. ... In the regular infantry, this is not necessarily a plus. But [in Iraq] this is not only one of the types of guys you want but you want him to lead because he understands what is going on.”

Not that understanding comes easily. A month before he died, Skip was reading a book about Islam for the fourth time. He tried to understand the reasons for the war he was part of, and the people and cultures involved.

“I must state emphatically that I am not on one side, politically or intellectually, when it comes to how I view this war in Iraq,” Skip wrote in an early journal entry. “I merely seek the truth concerning motives, reasons and justifications utilized to substantiate [the U.S.] initiation of hostilities.”

How did he seek the truth? His father had taken him and his sister to public libraries as “cheap entertainment” when Skip was a kid. And while some people claim familiarity with some of the so-called great books, Skip ended up reading all of them after he had found a used, 54-volume set of the “Great Books of the Western World” at a bookstore. By studying great minds he earned his own “personal B.A.”

Reading about Skip, you can’t help but think about the wisdom he might have presented to the halls of academia, Capitol Hill or the Pentagon once out of his Army Combat Uniform.

But in Iraq the “optimist of the human spirit” saw himself as an infantry soldier first.

In an e-mail note six days before he died, the exhausted Skip informed his wife that his tour had been extended three or four months. “You have to find what strengthens you and sustains you in this world” [of combat], he wrote. “Deep inside, this is so hard for me to be here but I motivate my boys so much that I tend to forget how painful things are for me while being strong for others.”

Throughout the book, Griffin allows his son to be the hero and the intellectual. He offers only the essentials about his own self-funded tour of Iraq after Skip was killed. However, the understated elder Griffin describes two haunting moments.

In a latrine trailer in Camp Ali Al Salem, he spots a scrawled and incorrectly phrased quote from Nietzsche on the wall of a stall. Below the misconstrued quotation is a corrected version. The editor had signed his name as “Skip.”

Later, during a solo midnight walk at the forward operating base FOB, he suddenly “heard another set of boots crunching on the gravel right beside me. The sound startled me. I looked over and there was Skip. ‘Dad, I love you. Don’t worry. I am in a good place. Please get back to your CHU [sleeping quarters].’

“I stopped to say something to him but he was gone.”

Before heading out on patrol, Skip always crossed his chest and asked — prayed — aloud for “strength and honor.” In “Last Journey,” he achieves and personifies both.

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J. Ford Huffman is a contributing writer for Military Times.

Last Journey, A Father and Son in Wartime by Darrell Griffin Sr. and Darrell “Skip” Griffin Jr., Atlas & Co., $25, 309 pages.

Staff Sgt. Darrell “Skip” Griffin Jr. was interviewed by Alex Kingsbury of U. S. News & World Report, and after his death was the subject of a cover story in the magazine. To read that story, go to www.usnews.com/usnews/griffin/.