Many of these name service members killed in action, police officers killed on duty, former governors, or famous Ohioans such as the sharpshooter Annie Oakley and the football player Lou Groza. The cars kept pushing along.Ī s of 2019, Ohio haD designated 394 memorial highways, including Nick’s. The sign was almost a half mile behind me. I was in the left lane and couldn’t get over. How many times in Iraq had I felt palpable fear in my body but did everything I could to keep my face blank, my expression passive? After an IED. I cussed quietly, tried to keep it all down. Two feelings surged inside me: grief so sharp in my throat that I could cry and a rage that manifested in my two-handed grip on the steering wheel, as if ready to rip it from the console. Just to tell them that I’d seen Nick’s sign. If I pulled over, what would I do anyway? Was I really going to loop around, park on the side of the highway, take a photo? Touch the metal sign? Run my hand over it? I also sensed a self-deprecating awareness: Yes, how sad, I’d seen the name of a dead friend on a road sign and now felt a numb indifference to the rest of the day-to the first football game of the season for the nationally ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. No one here fucking knows Zimmer, I thought. I never had.Īs I moved with the hundreds of other vehicles, I was angry to be among the anonymous mass passing his name. Guys typed things like “RIP Nick” and “Miss you brother.” I always told myself I’d go see the sign. A guy from our basic-training platoon, now a truck driver, had stopped on this freeway years back and taken a selfie with the sign. I thought about merging into the right lane to pull over. Fifteen years earlier, when he’d been killed by a rocket-propelled grenade near Kufa, Iraq, I was on a base four hours north, staring at dark hills and crooked coils of concertina wire during a quiet 12–4 a.m. I could hardly make out the words on the sign, and then it disappeared behind semis, but I knew what they said: Army Specialist Nicholaus E. I’d been holding my phone, listening to directions, and I dropped it. The brown aluminum placard flashed between passing cars. S outh of downtown Columbus, Ohio, lost on the way to a tailgate, I saw the road sign bearing his name.
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