Army Specialist Christopher M. North

When he first got it—because we tried to talk him out of it, and I said, "So long as you’re living in my home you’re not going to get a motorcycle", and his dad said the same thing to him—but when he got his own apartment and he got out on his own, he figured he could do whatever he darn well pleased, so, he did—he came up and drove his brand-new motorcycle up and showed his stepdad and I, and we just stood there with our mouths hanging open because we were just like “Oh my God,” because Christopher wasn’t afraid of anything.

He was pretty brave and bold, and if he wanted to do it he did it. He didn’t really think about it, he just did it. And I thought, I know what he’s going to do on this motorcycle: he is just going to just be a maniac, you know, oh God, too many people get killed on motorcycles, so it really frightened us. But he—you know, we made him—“You’ve got to wear a helmet, right?” “Oh, yeah yeah yeah”—well, one day he came over and he didn’t have a helmet on and he had a tank top and shorts and flip-flops, and I go “What are you doing? This is not safe—to ride on a motorcycle without a helmet and these kinds of clothes.” He goes, “Oh Mom, I’m going out to the beach,” he says, “Girls like to see a good looking guy without a helmet on on a motorcycle.” I said “Not if you get road rash!” (laughs)

But that was one thing that he thought about himself, that he would look good without a helmet on on his motorcycle. And I caught him popping a wheelie once—he didn’t know I was behind him on the highway—and I saw him popping a wheelie after he took off from a red light, and so I scolded him about that when I talked to him. He didn’t realize I was behind him. But I said, “You know, I have to admit you did look good doing it,” so that was another little funny story.

And some of his—I feel funny going on and on like this—but some of his friends that were deployed with him and all that said that he would talk about riding his motorcycle all the time, and he was going to get a bigger one, a faster one when he got out, and that—good things—and he did, he did talk about that, so.

He went to college for several months, and wasn’t really into the “going to school” thing, you know, going back to school. And he quit college, and signed up, and then he came home to me where we live here, and said, um, “Guess what I just did,” and I said “What,” and he said, “I just signed up to go into the Army.”

And I said, “You did what? There’s a war going on, Chris.” He goes, “Well I’m 18 and nobody can stop me,” and he’d signed the papers. And I said, “Well, we’re really proud of you and I commend you for that but that scares me, you know.”

But he just said he felt like it was his duty and it would give him more of, you know, like, consistency and a goal to look forward to and to—just to put him on a track in the right direction, I guess—positive direction, and grow him up, I guess you could say. And he even though about going into the FBI or anything like that when he was done, he thought about that.

He didn’t have any trouble transitioning to the Army life. He was a strong soldier. He talked about when he got back home how he couldn’t wait to get back to the nightlife, and teased his one buddy that was older than him how he liked to ride Harleys, because that’s what old men rode.

So they did a lot of joking, they said, back and forth about that kind of stuff. They nicknamed him the Goose. He smoked cigarettes, and he—even though he always had his own cigarettes—he would always go around and bum one cigarette from everybody that smoked. And somebody said “If you have your own cigarettes why are you bumming them from everybody else?” He said, “I just want to see how many I can get from everybody.”

He liked helping the people in Iraq because he wanted that to give them a chance of living free from murders and violence, and he would give out chocolate and candy to little kids over there that they would run across.

I think everything that he experienced in life—because he did, he did a lot of stuff in his short 21 years. He just, I mean like I said, he didn’t hesitate if he thought you know he wanted to do it like he took a long motorcycle trip to Indiana once, on his motorcycle by himself, and I mean he went and traveled and went different places and um, didn’t have a fear of doing this or that, and took up snowboarding on mountains and all that good stuff. And, so, the fact that he was not afraid and not shy and that he made decisions without really putting a whole lot of thought into them and just doing things—I think just made him strong.

And when he was in the military—when he joined and was in the military—he really grew up and matured pretty quickly, so I would’ve really loved to have seen him, you know, the man that he would have been today. Would have been 34 years today, at the beginning of July. 34 years old.

He was a loyal friend to everybody, and, I mean he had a lot of friends, he really did. I will say that, he was a pretty popular guy. He was very kind, very giving, very helpful, very good-looking—I'm his mother, I’m going to say that anyway, right?