Faith In America's Sons and Daughters

My mom's cousin Christopher Fassnacht is the only relative in my family to die in combat. His bomber was shot down over Germany, leaving behind a lot of sorrows and human memorials. My uncle Bill changed his last name from Fassnacht to Christopher, and I have a brother and a cousin named Chris.

So, on this Memorial Day I can reach back to get a sense of what we're honoring, but the personal touch is no closer than a great-cousin who died before I was born. My father is a World War II vet who was graduated early by Annapolis and sent to fight the last year of the war under the sea, on subs in the Pacific. I remember a piece of framed embroidered cloth with the SSN Truta's record iconized -- some fishing boats and freighters sunk; no warships sunk; and there across the bottom, a neat row of dozens of depth charges they survived.

That touches me. Thinking of my dad, young, black-haired and handsome, inside the sunken tube that was the Truta, as it shook from the near-by blasts.

I asked Dad recently if patriotic fervor caused him to leave his junior college in Mississippi and go to Annapolis. His eyes registered a bit of surprise, and perhaps a bit of shame. "No, it was the opposite," he said. "I figured that the war would be over before they graduated me in four years, and I'd be able to miss it." They graduated him in three, which meant he netted on extra two or three years in college, away from the war. It may have saved his life; and that may have led to me being here at all.

Still, Memorial Day touches me deeply, as it should all American's who recognize the great privilege it is to live in the Beacon of Democracy. But maybe not as much as it touches Frank Schaeffer, who wrote today in the LA Times about what it was to be a man like me, untouched personally by war, and suddenly have a son join the Marines and fight in Iraq:

I left my Marine asleep in his room. I poked my head through his door every few minutes. At one point, I found myself kneeling by his bed watching him breathe. I found myself praying and crying for all the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands and wives of those who were not coming home. For the first time in my life, I was weeping for strangers.

There are Americans on their knees next to fresh graves from Arlington to Bozeman, from Tampa to Fargo. There are young men and women learning to walk again and receiving skin grafts for horrible burns.

Before my son went to war I never would have shed tears for them. My son humbled me. My son connected me to my country. He taught me that our men and women in uniform are not the "other."

They are our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. Sometimes shedding tears for strangers is a sacred duty. Sometimes it's all we can do.

Full LATimes text here. Hattip to Hedgehog