Published Wednesday, June 02, 2010 2:49 PM
Updated Wednesday, June 02, 2010 2:49 PM
It was taken probably in 1960 or so, the evening of the West Point Founder’s Day Ball, and in it, my parents and their best friends – known to we urchins as “Uncle Ed and Auntie Fran” – are posing before going to their soirée. Dad and Uncle Ed, clad in dress uniforms, are captains in the U.S. Army; strong, handsome, ready to handle whatever the future holds. Mom and Auntie Fran look beautiful in their evening dresses and long gloves.
They are young significantly younger than I am now and I am their youngest child – and seem to exude this lithe confidence you just don’t see that much of anymore.
Of course, they’re barely in their 30s, and they have already done more in their few years than most of us will do in all of ours. My father, by the time he is 32, has been wounded in combat – about three weeks after his wedding day – has jumped out of airplanes at least 36 times, has fathered three children and is probably contemplating my eventual conception even as the camera snaps, and has spent three years in the forefront of the cold war; they spent three years in Berlin and left about two months before the wall went up. It was pretty much the same story with Uncle Ed.
Their two young women had sacrificed as well, watching their men go to war, holding the families together, giving each other support during the darker hours when they really didn’t know where their husbands were, what they were doing, and if they were coming back.
They sacrificed for us -- for all of us, actually -- and for that I am eternally grateful. I am even more grateful that they were able to come back home to us.
But I am the most grateful to the dads, the brothers, the smiling young men who never came back.
Two quotes come to mind. The first is from a book from my teenage years. Back then I read it more for the action than the sub-context. But Robert A. Heinlein said it best, in his science fiction classic “Starship Troopers,” when one of the characters explains to a classroom full of his students, “As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes.”
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t call that science fiction. I’d call it an accurate summation of a debt a lot of us owe forever.
The other quote is from President Ronald Reagan, probably the only politician I ever trusted implicitly:
“It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country, in defense of us, in wars afar away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray-haired. But most of them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives, the one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”
I look at my parents, young, strong, forever beautiful, and I think about so many others smiling up from misty photographs, also forever young and beautiful.
Thank you all for this, my life, my liberty, my country.
Flowers, flags, salutes, parades are not enough, not nearly enough. Not today. Not ever.