Ahead of the Jan. 19 memorial service on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Marine Sgt. Chris Hrbek’s death, Mayor Ray Arroyo has asked us to reprint these remarks he shared in our pages in 2015…
Imagining Christopher Hrbek
By Ray Arroyo
Special to Pascack Press
WESTWOOD—Last month marked five years since Sgt. Christopher Hrbek’s (USMC) combat death in Afghanistan. The Westwood Regional High School wrestling team has dedicated their 2015 season to him. And Zion Lutheran Church was recently filled with people who’d gathered there to remember him.
I’d never met him in life. I’d only known his death — so deeply felt throughout the community into which I had settled my family. So I was eager to learn more about him from the Marines he had served with as well as the family and friends sharing insight into who he was.
The stories coalesced into a sketch of a boy energetic, charismatic and funny. A natural leader who’d make you belly-laugh and who probably laughed mightily at himself.
But that caricature stands in stark contrast with the man who took the job of serving and protecting his Marines, his homeland and the Afghan people — as seriously as sin. If he appeared restless and intense about trivial matters; he also seemed completely composed and focused on those of consequence.
The pictures on Zion Lutheran’s altar displayed a devilishly handsome soldier. The kind of boy you’d probably want to keep an eye on around your daughter, and the one you’d be proud to have as a son-in-law.
One family friend told of his Westwood tree trimming exploits — leaping from limb to limb, swinging the blades of the trade in a Tarzan meets Edward Scissorhands moment. He was also supposed to mow her lawn. But he pressed his younger cousin into that sweaty service. Hrbek had rear deployed to his command center: the sofa. Manning the AC and TV remotes, he’d delegated the weed whacking to his young grunt. The vignette was classic Americana: Tom Sawyer getting his friend to paint the fence.
Fittingly, a Mark Twain quote speaks to more serious observations: “The two most important days in a man’s life are the day he is born… and the day he knows why.”
Witnesses suggest Hrbek had come by that knowledge at a very young age, and that consciousness may have freed him to live his too-short life to the fullest… with eyes wide open and without fear.
“The long arc of history,” we are told, “bends towards justice.” But who exactly does the bending?
Hrbek’s brother, Bo, spoke of Chris’ genuine desire to help the Afghan people — like a future Nobel laureate pulled off her school bus and shot, merely for being a female insistent upon a proper education. I don’t imagine Sgt. Hrbek spent much time fretting about being on “the right side of history.” He was too busy confronting its dark and ugly side… and leaving no doubt as to whose side he was on.
Hrbek was neither a tragic figure nor an unrealistically idealized one. Classic tragedies turn on some inevitable, internal flaw that thwarts the protagonist’s deepest aspirations. Hrbek was, until his very last moment, fully engaged in being the man he was born to be — the one, I think, he’d hoped to be. His homecoming was not a canonization, but a clear-eyed recognition of who he was and what his life meant to Westwood.
That life wasn’t taken. Hrbek’s point of departure was yet another selfless act of giving which, it seems, came naturally to him. Whether making sure his comrades were adequately fed at a party in his parents’ home or whether he’d done everything in his power to give his high school wrestling team a chance to succeed—that is what Westwood memorializes.
Hrbek’s was an inspirational life for the people who knew and loved him, and for many of us who can only imagine him.