This time of year, everyone is excited for the 4th of July. Fireworks, maybe some barbecue or grilling, a few beers with friends over dinner while the kidlets play in the warm evening sunshine, tumbling over one another like a litter of puppies and trying to catch fireflies as the sun goes down... It's like a Norman Rockwell dream. Quintessential summer.
While the little Stars and Stripes banners going up along main street, our family has been getting ready for a vacation next week to San Antonio. The kids are so excited they can barely sit still (wait...can they ever sit still?) and we've been reading What in the World Was the Alamo? so they'll have a little context when we visit. Growing up in Texas, the Alamo holds a lot of meaning for me. It's our Thermopolae, where a brave few lay down their lives to hold off an army so that the rest of Texas could regroup and finally throw off the shackles of a tyrant. Does my 3.5 yr old quite grasp that? Not yet. He doesn't even know where Mexico is yet. But that doesn't stop me from explaining it.
You see, this time of year, while the stores are advertising "Independence Day Blowouts!" with a guy in a bad Uncle Sam costume, the party supply stores are decked in red, white, and blue foil crap, and most of the morning talk shows are sharing grilling tips, the men and women of our military are going about their every day life. (Stay with me here, it's not quite the non sequitur you may think.) For some, it's going to be one more holiday they miss because they're "stuck in the sandbox". It's been like that for a decade now and despite what's said on the news it isn't likely to change.
These guys are out there, dusty, smelly, hot, and unbelievably bored most of the time. When they're not bored, it's usually because all hell has broken loose and their adrenaline is pumping, helping to hold down the terror while they do what needs to be done to get the situation under control again. But most of the time they're bored. When a holiday like Independence Day comes around they may fantasize about sitting by the pool with a cold beer, condensation rolling down the side of the bottle as they soak up the sunshine and the sharp smell of mustard mingled with the grease of burgars hot off the grill. But thoughts of home often turn toward the reason they're missing yet another holiday (again), toward the men and women who went into battle before them and the ones who didn't come home. They're thinking about freedom too, but they're thinking of what it cost.
You see, with military life comes the life-altering realization that every warrior before you, from OIF and OEF all the way back to the Trojan War and beyond, was once in your shoes. They thought like you. They felt like you. They were cold. They were hot. They were bored. They were scared. They wished they were at home. When they were finally home they wished they were back with their friends, their comrades in arms, because they seemed to be the only people who understood all this and the weight of the warrior legacy. Every military man in history started exactly where our men and women in uniform are today. Even the heroes. Even George Washington. Even Sam Bowie and William Travis in their Alamo. The ones who made it home and the ones who didn't. And you may not come home, either. It happened to some of them, and it could happen to you.
When every military man and woman in history suddenly seems like a real, relatable person and not some abstract "hero" in a textbook that means they may as well have been you. You may as well have been them. You are somehow equal now, in a way, and it's easy to imagine the myriad little things they must have given up to fight their wars because you've given them up too. Even if no harm comes to you, you make a lot of sacrifices by the time your service has ended. Missed holidays, missed birthday parties, apartments too tiny and in a bad neighborhood because you had to move and didn't have time to really look for a new home... Stress and worry and bureaucracy and loneliness... Pulling up roots. Looking for enemy in every crowd. And it's suddenly all too easy to mourn the ones who didn't make it back because they made the same sacrifices you do, and then some. They lived this life too, or one as close as it could get for their time. You can imagine being I'm their shoe. And this is not a burden carried by our service men and women alone, but also by their spouses and families back home. The same thoughts go through their minds, at some point. I know, because that was me.
See? Proud Marine Corps wife, circa 2007. And with the knowledge that my husband might someday be asked to lay down his life to protect his brothers came also the realization that every wife of a fallen soldier, sailor, marine, or airman, every wife of a fallen warrior through all time, had at one point been exactly where I was standing. They felt as I felt. Women wept for these men as I would weep for mine if the worst were to happen. It's as hard now to read the Iliad without weeping for poor doomed Hector and his baby boy, or grieving with Achilles over the body of brave Patroclus, as it is to read the reports of the latest casualties. I imagine the grief of the wives and families and friends back home, and it hurts.
And I want our kids to feel that too. As difficult as it is to bear at times because every loss is painful, even those that happened a hundred years ago, or a thousand, I want them to feel that loss all the way down to their core, every single time. I want them to know the hurt that the families of those slain at the Alamo or in the Revolutionary War must have felt. These men weren't superheroes. They were just like me and you, with families at home just like ours who ached for the loss of fathers and husbands and sons and brothers just as many do today. It could have been my kids' father. It may as well have been our family. And those men weren't immune to fear when enemy fire whizzed by their cheek, so close they could feel the breath of it. They were as terrified as you or I would be, in their place, because we are all human. Yet they managed to stamp it down and keep fighting in the hope that their lives would buy something valuable and noble for future generations: freedom. Independence. Liberty. I want our children to understand, at the very core of their being, exactly what that meant to these men and their families, so that my children will value those freedoms so dearly bought by this blood. And I want them to realize that if all of these outrageous heroes who achieved so much are just normal people like them, then they can achieve just as much. They have it in them to be courageous and noble too.
Do the kids understand this right now, at age 3 and 5 and 7 years old? No. Right now they're just excited about fireworks and a vacation coming up. They're busy chasing butterflies and playing in the sunshine. But they will grow to understand it in time because as they grow up I will never let them forget the sacrifices made, both great and small, that bought for us this life. As we study the tales of Hector and Achilles, King Arthur and Beowulf, the defenders of the Alamo and the patriots of Valley Forge, and hear the stories of our ancestors at Brannockburn and Manassas and those shot down by nazis over Austria, along with the battle stories of our friends at Fallujah and Kandahar, it will begin to sink in. These men and women, deep down, were all the same, despite the great march of time, and their lives were as dear to them a thousand years ago as they are to those fighting today, and as dear as our own. They were normal people doing extraordinary things and sacrificing what was most precious for something greater. No death is little, and that makes the freedom we hold that much more precious. I hope my children grow up in that truth.
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