Twenty-five locals woke up prior to the first light of the new day of January 26 and waited inside McCarran airport, with knots in their throats but also with eternal patience.
Not because the man they had come to see off to Iraq—Joe Heck, a colonel in the Army reserve and an emergency-room doctor at UMC—was a close friend of theirs, these men and women who call themselves Soldiers’ Angels. The truth is, they hardly knew the man.
Nor because Heck, a Republican senator in the Nevada Legislature, represents them. Few who huddled at McCarran with Starbucks in one hand and American flags in the other actually live in Sen. Heck’s Las Vegas district.
Nor even due to the fact that a politician departing for war—not to observe but to participate—is a rare and venerable sight to be seen anywhere, at any time of the day. Several of the women who showed up, wearing light blue shirts with the defining slogan “Proud Military Mother” on the back, come to see anyone’s son off to Iraq.
No: They all waited in the somnolent airport from 5 a.m. until Heck’s arrival an hour and a half later, which they serenaded with “God Bless America” and welcomed with effusive hugs, to remind the senator as he leaves for Iraq to serve as a battleground medic that he has support.
“We represent America,” said Eileen May, whose son has once been to Iraq and is scheduled to leave again in May.
And, above all, they waited to reaffirm to the family of Colonel Heck—who accompanied him to McCarran and who were in tears—that they do not have to wait for his return to Las Vegas alone.