The Renovating Reverend

When there’s a parade in town, it almost always goes through the Old Town neighborhood.  The Memorial Day parade, which is coming up soon, isn’t the largest, but it might be the longest, wending its way from the downtown area through the Old Town and Sunrise neighborhoods to the old cemetery.

Large American flags line the main road through the cemetary, and each one represents a military veteran who has passed away.  One of them is for Steve’s father, who was a tanker during  WW II.  We have a panoramic photo of his outfit, flanked by Sherman tanks, one of which has the name “Crazy Cat” scrawled across the front in chalk.  I look at that photo and smile until I remember things like most of those guys were at the Battle of the Bulge, hungry as hell and/or miserably freezing their asses off.  They had to be tenacious, lucky, or courageous–or perhaps all three–to make it through and come back home.

One word you will seldom hear me use to describe a fellow veteran is “heroic.” That could be because I’m a Cold War veteran, and the drill sergeants taunted us in Basic Training by calling us “Hee-row” with a sneer in their voices.  Or, maybe it’s because the highly-decorated Vietnam veterans I served with would never use the word.  One in particular would only wear all of his medals on special occasions, and only to knock some of the overblown pride out of the non-combat guys who loved their achievement medals just a  bit too much.  He’d been awarded everything except the Medal of Honor, multiple times. Man, that guy had, as they say, been to hell and back.  The journey was written on his face and on his body.  Call him, or any of the men (and women) like him, a hero, and they’d give you a lecture about how making it out alive didn’t make anyone a hero. Nor did dying.  It was as if the word carried a fluffy, romantic meaning that cheapened real sacrifice.

That was many years ago.  Now it seems that even more people than ever before, military and otherwise, are touted as heroes.  I get the feeling that the word comforts those who use it, or perhaps gives some of them comfortable distance on the suffering of those they call heroes.  It could be that the use of the word has changed over time and simply doesn’t mean what it used to.  For me, the word doesn’t carry much meaning.

Words–any words–can be awfully cheap. Service–any type of service–comes at some sort of cost. It requires giving of ourselves. The very best way I know how to honor service is to serve.

After all the speeches are done and the accolades have been liberally bestowed, and after we share the stories of those who served, may we always remember to move beyond the words and honor service with our actions.