Take Me To Post Comment Form With Memorial Day coming up, I think about the guys I was lucky enough to meet, hundreds upon hundreds, who served in some pretty nasty places over the last couple of decades. And I think about the few I met who didn’t make it home.
I remember meeting a guy who was around 30 and gave up a good job as a printer in Texas to join the Army after 9/11. I remember a young man from Indiana who was a scout for an armor battalion in the attack on Baghdad and came home to marry his teenage sweetheart. He wanted to die an old man on his riding lawn mower. He died with three other soldiers when an IED exploded underneath his Humvee.
I haven’t done a career day presentation since the morning a few years ago in Hinesville. I was at one of the middle schools and I told the kids how I do my job. To show them I how interview someone, I went up to a young girl in the front row and introduced myself and asked her name.
She told me her name — and who her dad was. They lived a couple of doors down from my folks. Her dad was blown out of his Humvee when he took a RPG round to the chest.
I leaned toward her and whispered in her ear so the other students could not hear, telling her “I’m very sorry about your father.” It took me a minute to collect my composure and get on with the presentation.
I think about the young man from Texas who had been a high school coach but enlisted in the Army after 9/11. He was badly wounded and lost both his legs.
I think about my Uncle Bob, a wonderful, warm, funny man whom I didn’t get to meet until I was in my late teens. He lived in Texas, but he and Dad always exchanged Christmas cards, if not visits.
Bob guarded a weather station on Iceland in World War II. It wasn’t terribly bad duty, except for the natives being more aligned with the Germans than the Americans. He got called back to duty for the Korean War. He was one of the Chosin Few, the Marines who staved off hundreds of thousands of Chinese in subzero temperatures near the Chinese-Korean border. He never talked about the experiences there at the frozen hell on earth.
We’ll celebrate Memorial Day on Monday, and I urge each of you to come to Veterans Park in Springfield at 6 Monday evening.
You also can be a part of the welcome home picnic for Alpha Battery by giving a gift from your business for the soldiers to win in a drawing. For more information, call 754-6730 or 658-6729.