Armies of the Night

Rain clouds hover like a funeral shroud over the city as I write, reflecting back the mood of a village that has lost a son.

The air is wet and hot and uncomfortable as though nature by its ageless perceptions is aware of the sadness that has somehow embraced us all.

An officer is down. His name is Filbert Cuesta.

I realize that in an age that counts its dead in multiples of millions the death of one man will not alter any of Earth’s rhythms or stamp a lasting imprint on history.

At best, our names are written on sand and sooner or later the ocean reaches up and washes them away.

Cuesta’s widow will go on, his two small children will grow, other officers will fall, and the memory of the event that took his life will fade as time moves relentlessly forward.

Then what’s the point of all these words? I think that something ought to be said about those who venture out into the nights of the village to protect us from the wildness that exists there.

As warriors in an army of atonement, they face what any soldier faces, shifts of endless boredom broken by moments of sheer terror. . . . But when the boredom explodes and terror is afoot anything can happen.

In the company of peril, no one is safe.

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Eulogies will attend the ritual funeral for Officer Cuesta and some will call him a hero. I’m uneasy with that. He was a cop doing his job and if there’s an element of heroism in that, OK I guess, but it’s not what the word was intended to mean.

The truth is he was shot through the head while stopped on a dark street waiting for backup, ambushed by thugs making their mark by killing a cop.

Heroics are generally based on confrontation, not duty. Cuesta was robbed of even the opportunity to confront, to march into gunfire to protect the innocent or to risk his life to save a city.

There were no drums or bugles on the night he died. Only his partner, Richard Gabaldon, heard whatever last sounds he made, only his partner witnessed his last startled look of life.

And now the black bands, and now the motorcade, and now the bagpipes.

What took Cuesta’s life was a combination of events that bear heavily upon the public conscience, the easy availability of guns among them.

There are those who say that if we all had guns, the bad guys who terrorize us would be less inclined to test our mettle.

Cuesta had a gun. So did Gabaldon. But so did those who waited in the shadows for the patrol car to pass and then, in a moment of stupidity and savagery, pulled a trigger.

The guns cops carry are of little value when killers move like guerrilla armies through the night. We saw how poorly our bombs and cannons did in Vietnam against shadow troops. We lost that war. Will we lose this one?

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Cops aren’t always good guys. There are brutal, redneck racists among them, liars and thieves and killers and rapists who have darkened the good name of the constabulary throughout history.

I have written more than once of these uniformed Neanderthals and take back not a word of it. If I have seemed harsher on them than on others it is only because more is expected of those who proclaim to protect and to serve.

Perhaps commitment if not heroism lies there.

We demand more of our guardians than we do of each other. They must be cleaner and braver and somehow purer than the rest of us. They’ve got to be firm but friendly, wary but approachable, armed but not dangerous.

We’ve got to be able to trust them, to hide behind them, to assure ourselves that in the end society’s needs are better served because they’re out there.

We have given them our sons, and now our daughters, because there is a kind of nobility in what they do when they deliver babies, save lives or stand between us and evil in the conduct of duty.

Perhaps therein lies a new and different definition of the word hero. To perform one’s duty in the face of danger can require a quieter courage, subduing an instinct to hide for the sake of a higher moral imperative.

Part of Cuesta’s duty was to check out a noisy party, to recognize gangbangers and to call for backup. He was doing that duty when evil took his life. The sky darkens in his memory. The city weeps.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com