1 July 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2785: reserve
Captain Josiah Parker heard through the grapevine that Colonel Sandy Gebhardt had died in a car accident, and checked the file he kept, because he had heard the name before.
“Yes, he served with Col. Lee – I thought so,” Capt. Parker said. “Here we go.”
Col. H.F. Lee was known not to take the deaths of his men well – not known well enough, because the calm reserve he continually made his public face was enough for a lot of years to keep the people responsible for some of those deaths not understanding what was happening to them. Since age 13, he had been making sure that if you touched one of his, you didn't get to do it twice. He just went into another gear when those he considered his own were threatened.
Col. Lee came by this tendency as his inheritance. Capt. Parker knew a particular Lee uncle of the colonel's had flipped out for about a decade – from 1855 to 1865 – because he felt his family's well-being was threatened. Nobody in the way of that was safe from Arlington to Appomattox. R.E. Lee had stopped only when continuing would have killed more of his than not – so that meant that with any Lee of the same line and similar internal makeup, flip on that defensive gear, and you might have a Civil War-sized problem on your hands.
Capt. Parker had done some additional study. Gen. Lee probably faced some of the same problems after the Civil War that his nephew was dealing with in 2020: PTSD in his beloved men, and them making bad decisions, except that as long as there was a chance Gen. Lee might see them like that, those men kept their lives together as much as they could. His colonel nephew, previous to March 2020, had adapted a similar personal strategy with the assistance of his best adjutant, Major Ironwood Hamilton.
But the pandemic had broken the fellowship, and now, in September, the results were coming due. Some men had gone on and gotten into the Veteran's Lodge for advanced treatment, with the colonel they worshiped and the major they loved running interference on that too, pulling folks out of situations turning bad, intervening with fed-up family members and employers – but now, Lofton County itself was falling apart, and Army Reserve weekends were also shut down for the moment. So, folks were doing what they would do, left to themselves with no internal drive to get treatment and stick with it.
Col. Lee did not take these situations well, quiet as it was kept – they played havoc internally with him, although behind that calm reserve, few knew. They triggered him in an area in which he had a weakness … he had lost his first wife and child in childbirth at just age 18, and had been able to get through that level of anguish and helplessness because he knew they were going to God, and submitted there, in an act of faith striking in one so very young.
But there was no such refuge when men he had served with and bonded with just died like fools despite the colonel's best efforts – this man was backup for the Veteran's Lodge suicide line for high-ranking officers, was paying out of his pocket for people to get advanced treatment, was known to be driving around at all hours of the night along with Major Hamilton to pull folks out of situations and drop them off at the Veteran's Lodge for various kinds of help – it was like the colonel was still on the battlefield, planning his men's safety and that of all the men adjacent to them, and those adjacent to them. Little wonder he was unofficially the acting chief of police in Big Loft, VA, keeping the city quiet in the recent upheaval – this was child's play! He was unofficially General Lee, too, but, for obvious historical and political reasons, the U.S. Army wasn't quite ready to force the colonel out of official retirement.
But, who one is, one is. Capt. Parker understood this. His patient was as close as anyone would ever get to sitting down with a whole General Lee in Virginia – all the potentials, all the danger, and it really came down to dealing with a man like that, triggered.
Capt. Parker picked up the phone and dialed the colonel's mobile number.
“Good morning. Col. H.F. Lee speaking,” came the calm, full tenor – a lovely, smooth, well-modulated tone.
“Good morning, Colonel, it is Capt. Parker.”
“Good morning, Capt. Parker. I appreciate your always ready concern.”
“I know you tried hard for Col. Gebhardt, sir.”
“I always try hard, Captain. If there is anything that I have in common with God, it is that it is not my will that any should perish. But I am coming to understand that His choice is my boundary; since He permits people to follow their pet sins to destruction, I cannot turn those so committed to their own end aside.”
The smooth voice never altered in timbre. Col. Lee was calm in the refuge of his choice: his ever-deepening Christian faith. This was an advance. The colonel, already, had surrendered to God's will – he had seen it and accepted it in a case in which the outcome was so much more not to his liking than that of his first great loss.
But the captain was not lulled into a false sense of security about his patient. How that patient had made it to age 44 as the known highest-functioning untreated case of bipolar disorder of his graduating class of officers from West Point and Special Forces School was a thing that was actually being studied at the Pentagon – the mental toughness and internal spiritual balance of the man was legendary. But just because he had done that didn't mean he could afford to presume on it any further. Capt. Parker was part of the colonel's own regimen for optimum mental health, and he had to stay on top of things.
“I have time for an extra therapy session for you today, Colonel, and I think you should take it. Are you maintaining your prescription regimen right now?”
“Yes to both, Captain.”
Col. Lee, once he knew what he was dealing with at age 44, had been a little slow starting treatment, being thrown into deep depression about the Army keeping the information from him for 26 years, but Maj. Hamilton had known how to reach the colonel's heart on the subject. Col. Lee had become the model patient for mental health management, first out of love for his men who needed the same, and then in seeing the benefits for himself. He stayed with it, without fail.
“I will look for your Zoom link at 6:45, Captain,” the colonel said.
“I'll have it out to you when we get off the phone, Colonel.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
Much later, in the session, Col. Lee finally let down that reserve, just a little.
“I knew Sandy Gebhardt wasn't going to make it,” he said, “but I have never wanted to be wrong so much in this year, and never so heartbroken to be right. I know his entire family … they will now be going through it because the people who wrote him off years ago are going to be crowing and get their mouths stopped potentially for good by those who still loved them. This particular branch of the family can get wild, and there are 12 grandchildren, 13 nieces and nephews, and … .”
Capt. Parker just listened to all these details coming from his patient, and then said afterward, “You always have a whole file on anyone you know just ready to go in your mind, Colonel – it is never not going to be impressive, but can we start the conversation about why you care about these people's families so much more than they do themselves, and how you can redirect some of that energy?”
The colonel jumped.
“It's not that the Gebhardt family doesn't need or deserve the care you would provide,” Capt. Parker said, “but it is that you cannot be everything to everyone. As we've discussed before, you lost your actual family very young and you transferred all that reaction over to becoming a ferocious protector and defender of the men you served with, during and after your actual service. Nothing to regret in that: it has made you the responsible and highly capable leader you are today. But now, Colonel, you have remarried, and you have your extended Ludlow family, too. So, you need to establish some boundaries internally that you've never had as an adult man.”
The colonel considered this.
“I have been praying about what you speak of since my last conversation with General C.I. Williams: he advised me similarly last week, and we did not know of the situation with Col. Gebhardt then. It therefore must be time for me to attend to this matter. I do not know how it can be done at my late age of 46, but I am willing to learn and apply.”
“That's all it takes, Colonel,” Capt. Parker said. “You can do this. Remember: the hard part was up to age 44, managing bipolar disorder and complex PTSD while not even knowing what was going on, and then transitioning into the intensive treatment and support you needed at age 45. We're just building on that, sir. You can do this.”