Memorial Day 2010

National holidays—especially Memorial Day and Veterans Day—have always been special to me, probably at least partly because I grew up on the back porch of Texas A&M University when it was still the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, essentially all male, with compulsory corps training that led to military commissions, and partly because I was born on Veterans Day, which has always forced me to remember our vets on my birthday, if for no other reason than that my birthday cards never arrived exactly on the right day. For a brief spate in the 70s, Veterans Day was made a Monday holiday and Susan Rene probably hurt herself making sure my cards arrived exactly on time; but within a couple of years, we were back to business as usual.

Yesterday I got a sort of startling reminder that this Memorial Day remembers soldiers who have fallen but also honors those who are alive, including my own Soldier Son. SS is in Germany right now at an Army base called Baumholder, which has long been a training center for soldiers deploying to war zones; SS will go to Afghanistan in November.

The real reminder came crashing in on me as I was traveling back from Lubbock, where I had attended a 2-week continuing education seminar at Texas Tech University to help me be a better tech writing teacher. I was bounding down the highway toward home and Number One Son, who is in the throes of wanting to change jobs again, when I pulled over for a pit stop in a little town called Rising Star. I popped in to a convenience store, used the restroom, and refilled my soft drink (total cost: 86 cents) when I noticed cards to support the USO for a dollar. I handed the clerk a 5 and told her to drop a dollar into her USO fund, and she asked me to fill out a card to add to the collection on her wall. I  told her I had a son in Germany training for Afghanistan, and she said, "You can put your name or his on the card." So I spelled out his name and followed it with "Germany."

That's really the first time I've written down where he is since I learned his deployment date, and I felt odd writing my son's name on a USO card. I took that odd feeling with me out to the car, backed out of the lot, and looked down the highway that ran through the heart of the little old town, where I saw alternating US and Texas flags flying at even intervals a few hundred feet apart. I was so touched I almost took a picture looking back from the other side, but my rear-view mirror suggested the flags wouldn't have shown up very well. In retrospect, I wish I had shot it anyway. As I pulled out of town, my Barry Manilow CD started up "American Bandstand," and I felt for a moment as if I were driving through a Norman Rockwell painting with sound.

SS has already completed 6 years in the Army Reserves that included a tour of duty in Iraq shortly after that war began. I was proud of him for signing up then, proud of him for serving, and confident that he would come back home at the end of his tour. I knew the consequences of war zones, though, and I had faith that if he came home in a box, his spirit and soul would be in the safe hands of my mom and dad, whose spirits have long since flown. Whenever I heard of horrors of that war, I held my breath until he contacted me, every time to tell me he was not only alive but also far away from the worst of the action. He told stories of everyday dangers that soldiers take as part of the job and relate lightly, but the fact was that he was alive, and I was grateful to see him home again and not to have him called for a second tour.

He came home from that war less changed than I really expected. His job as a truck driver meant he saw less than the infantry of the fighting, but it put him in a place to determine that he was coming home to go to college, he was going to go to A&M, and he was going to wear the Aggie ring and senior boots with pride. He did all that, and then decided that today's economy, the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his previous experience were pointing him back toward a career in the military.


I'm still proud of him—hugely so—but I feel so much differently this time. I found myself horribly torn in college between my ingrained belief in our soldiers, learned from knowing a number of young men who studied at A&M before going off to fight in Vietnam, and my belief that war is not the answer; instead, it's mostly a distraction that forces one side in the argument to capitulate to the other's demands, usually at the cost of too many lives. SS recognizes how I feel; in fact, he told me from the beginning that his desire to go to Iraq was to help clean up the mess America's misdirected attacks had already made, and as a driver, that was really the job he did.

In Afghanistan, he knows he will be in the thick of action, but he's going in at a time when the battle is being fought more appropriately in terms of peacemaking than of warmongering, and he believes that, unlike Iraq, this was a war we were invited to join, not one we started ourselves out of hubris. In short, he's going there because he believes our country needs men like him to serve, and he believes a military lifestyle suits his personality and needs. He knows—and I know—that this time, or next time, or the next, he could come home in a box, but he goes on believing that he will not, and that his contribution will be part of something that, for now, has to be done.

I am proud of him, and I fly my flag in his personal honor on this Memorial Day.