On Memorial Day in 2017 I spent the morning working in my office. Before returning home for lunch, I stopped to visit the grave of my son. Mount Olivet cemetery was beautiful with American flags marking the graves of the veterans. It brought to mind these lines from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town:
“Over there are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves…New Hampshire boys… had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends – the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”
I served in the military for 22 years. I lost a lot of buddies – I can still see their faces. I sometimes feel like they are looking at me silently and I wonder what they think and if I am doing them proud by my life. An unfair standard perhaps but they are gone, lives snuffed out in a blink, and I’m still here. Why them? Why not me? A useless question maybe but one that I ask when I have the courage to look deep (which isn’t often anymore)…
Thanks for the beautiful music. It didn’t just sound marvelous, it felt marvelous…
“Why them? Why not me?”
In the immortal words of Shakespeare:
GLOUCESTER
KING HENRY V
Thanks Don. I’ve been in a melancholy mood lately. Time passes and seems to accelerate away. Images of faces I cherished return to remind me of good, brave friends gone too soon. Your notes frequently give me pause and I leave the present to live in the past for awhile to remember when I pulled on my uniform and faced the unknown. We did what we had to do and counted on each other to make it through. Not a lot of overwhelming self-reflection. Instead, we planned, we prayed, we strapped it on and went to work and hoped for the best. Some didn’t come back – the holes that came about never were filled but the conveyor belt of pain kept moving. Rambling a bit but I sense my time is coming and it got me thinking. Thanks for all you do – this site is a life saver! God bless all who are part of the TAC experience!