It’s Memorial day!
So you have been planning this weekend for quite some time. Long weekend, weather is getting much better and the bug life is really starting to bloom! Did all the yard work, or at least enough to please SWMBO. You have gone through all your gear and you are ready! Maybe got ahold of a couple of friends and planned a three day weekend trip. Maybe saved up some PTO time so you can even make it a four day weekend.
Or maybe you’re just gonna stay home and fire up the BBQ! Have a few friends over. Or go out to that park where all the friends and co workers are having a picnic! You know we can do just about anything we want! After all we have a job, plenty to eat and drink, nice home with a pretty cool back yard! Dogs are chasing a tennis ball. Cars are in good running condition full of gas and even washed! Kids are well taken care of, out on summer break.
All this we seem to just take for granted or even come to think that we just have it coming. Well let’s take a few minutes to think of why we have all this freedom. Many of our military men and women and their families have sacrificed more than we can even imagine so that we can live the life we have come to expect and just feel that it is normal. Let’s take a few minutes out of our lives to reflect on the families who have sacrificed so much.
I’m sure that I can speak for all of the fly fishing community when I say to our military men and women past and present:
Thank you for all that you have done for us and given to us!
Joe E. Arguello
Amen! This was a great reminder. The peace we enjoyed yesterday was hard-earned by others. Thank you for the post.
Amen
Harry Briscoe, who makes fly rods and hunts for oil, in his warm and generous way sent thanks to me, of all people, for my service in WWII. I responded with the email below. Harry says that I should post it on this Decoration Day Sunday.
And so, since I am nothing if not obedient, in or out of the Navy, here it is.
Dear Harry, I bet you say those nice things to all the girls. When I was close to being sent home, when the war was over in ’45, I felt guilty that I had done little to help win the war. I had merely kept the stills cooking, making fresh water, for a Sea Bee outfit stymied on a tiny island in the Philippines. We were an outfit detached to rebuild wrecked rolling stock and commissioned for a longer war with fewer resources, but, in the end, the U.S. got ahead of the war, and so we were not needed after all– not needed.
I knew that when I got home this “education thing” (the GI Bill) was waiting. I was sure to reap greater benefits than I ever deserved. And such was the case. I have never ceased feeling that I owe the Nation a great debt. School teaching felt like an appropriate way to pay back the loan of my full life.
You and my nephew-in-law send out similar gestures of thanks on this big spring holiday. Here in Boulder, the running of its popular foot-race shuts down access to the grave yards and the honored dead lying in them. But I shall find a way through the blockades.
I know some veterans who really deserve your kind thoughts; for instance, my 93 year old barber, Fred Saiz. But not I, Harry, not I. It may be fairly said of me that I followed orders, did mostly as I was told, and might well have been told to go another place and die– as did my most excellent of friends Ralph Metcalf in his first hour of combat on Luzon. I was, all the while, safe and sound down on little Calicoan cooking the salt out of sea water for my buddies to drink and wash their socks in.
I was barely an 18 year old in a Naval Sea Bee outfit full of middle-aged construction men, the greatest of men, for whose association I am grateful beyond the power of telling. Had I not been given that war, I would never have been given those guys.
And so, on Decoration Day, I wish I had been really useful and done something more than just privately memorable. Still, I am proud beyond the power of telling that I was part of it, ready to go, got there, and did my lowly job. I was among superb men.
Back home, in the excitement of my undergraduate education, I felt I must somehow pay back for that education and the benefits accruing to it. I was obligated to the Nation I had served. I was obligated to its community and its welfare. I never got over it. That war was really something. There are things worse than war.
Thanks for thinking of my good old ship-mates.
Gordon
I was reminded on Saturday when the news announced a 20 year old private killed in Afghanistan was returned to my town Wheaton IL for burial Sunday.
I served during (not in) Vietnam as an officer but it did not cost me anything.
It cost this man and his parents his life for us. Today is for him.