A Salute to All Our Veterans

A new day has dawned, we have a new President-elect coming into office on January 20, and a couple of too-long ongoing wars in far places to bring to as honorable an end as possible, as soon as possible. With a hearty shout-out to all our veterans, especially those with whom we served all those many decades ago. Here’s hoping the new day will bring about the ‘right thing’, despite the distractions of economic meltdown. Real help for the tens of thousands of returning veterans from our current wars who have suffered grievous injuries. Schooling and re-training for all. Treatment for PTSD, even for the oldest veterans among us, war does terrible things to people’s minds.

So, in honor of our nation’s brave veterans, what follows is an edited repost of my experience the first time I visited ‘The Wall’ - the Vietnam War Memorial. It was May of 1985, we had been called to D.C. to testify at a hearing. We brought the kids, 15 and 16 at the time, since they had few memories of when we’d lived close enough to Washington to be there for the 4th of July, to visit the Smithsonian museums regularly, to picnic and fly kites on glorious spring days on the Mall.

Because it had been more than a decade since we’d visited, we of course had to make the pilgrimage to The Wall - the Vietnam Memorial finally installed below a berm years after that ill-advised war was over. The overall impression of the polished black granite wall etched with the names of the dead is somber, almost buried, unspeakably sad. My Vietnam-era veteran husband and I were in tears before we even got close enough to read any names.

The cherry blossoms were still hanging on, loosing wafts of pink petals elsewhere to entice the normal crowds of tourists on that day, at the time we got to the wall. So we had it practically to ourselves, a few individuals and small clusters of people here and there along its length.

Today is Veteran’s Day, when honoring those brave men and women who have fought our wars and defended our country since before we even had a country to defend, is the traditional activity. When my husband stopped with the kids to look at some of the little shrines of homemade crosses and flowers and notes folded and stuck into the joints of the wall, I walked on to find the name I’d come to touch. They would catch up.

They’re alphabetical, those tens of thousands of names. So it wasn’t hard to find the one I sought, even as the ghosts of those names I was not seeking floated past my eyes and through my mind in a seemingly endless stream. So neatly capitalized. So many.

When I found him, I reached out to touch him. Remembering a life, not an ugly death. I ran my fingers over the etched letters of his name, nestled so comfortably amidst so many others and not out of my reach. I closed my eyes and leaned into that half-buried wall knowing it would never yield to my weight of pushing back. My hand on his name, tears quietly flowing down my cheeks, falling like rain on the cobbles at my feet. It felt good to cry. It was a good time and place to cry.

As I stood silently weeping a large, warm hand covered my own and I felt the closeness of a man next to me, his other hand resting lightly on my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw the age in that hand covering my own, knew this was a stranger reaching out with me. For some long moments we stood there leaning together into the name on that wall, until his touch lifted and my tears slowed. I turned to him, thinking to express my thanks - if I could find the words.

Tall and thin, I had to look up to see his face, the tears rolling down his cheeks. It was Jimmy Stewart. Yes, THAT Jimmy Stewart. Before I could get any words past the lump still in my throat, he squeezed my shoulder gently and walked on, not looking back. We’d not spoken a word, we had just shared a grief. I was, to put it mildly, rather amazed. What a very odd thing, on a day when so few people were here, to have shared those tears with this famous, kindly and so fatherly figure.

Of course I wondered why he was there that day. Just in town, sight-seeing? Visiting old friends and colleagues from his days as Brigadier General in the USAF Reserve? Making a round of memorials after visiting his own and remembering the 60 B-17 flight crews - his own men - lost on that fateful mission he led in 1943 to bomb the German ball bearings works in Schweinfurt on “Black Thursday?”

It was not until years later that I discovered Stewart’s son Ronald McLean was killed in action in Vietnam in 1969. He’d been there grieving too, as privately as me. Perhaps felt a need to make that simple physical connection with me, for those few precious moments. He was a a courageous warrior and career veteran whose face and bearing are familiar to generations - a famous man. I was no one at all, just someone touching a name on a wall, crying.

Perhaps that is something all of us who remember can share. For all the dead in all the wars, all the veterans coming home from current wars who will have no monuments of remembrance with which they can connect, for those wars are not scheduled ever to end. When will we ever learn?

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Filed under Memorials, Military, Veterans, War |