For our country, the Vietnam war was different from any war before it. In World War I and World War II, the country supported its soldiers and were proud of their service. But during Vietnam, many Americans disagreed with the war and took it out on the military. When vets came back from serving in Vietnam, they were not treated with respect but were spit on and cursed.

A lot has changed since then. Americans have learned to separate their feelings about war from their feelings about the soldiers who have pledge to fight it. Since then, regardless of whether they support any war our country is involved in, Americans support the troops because of the lessons they learned from the wrongs done to the Vietnam vets. There have been vast improvements in services provided to all vets because the Vietnam vets showed us what was wrong with the system. Life is vastly better for today’s troops because of the sacrifices of the Vietnam vets.

Today, we want to thank the Vietnam vets. We want to thank them for their serving despite an unappreciative nation. We want to thank them for performing their duties regardless of their own feelings about the war. We want to thank them for the lasting effects on our country. You sacrificed and suffered for it, but we have learned important lessons from you. Our current troops have benefited from your service, with better health care, better mental health services, but most of all, they now receive expressions of appreciation because you did not. We may not be able to go back and undo the unfair treatment you received, but rest assured that your service has made a great difference for all of us – citizens and soldiers alike. We thank you for your service during a troubled time, and we thank you for your lasting contributions to our country.

Looking for We are Mothers? 

Yesterday, I had the privilege of seeing my words in action. And I am humbled by the experience.

I belong to Blue Star Mothers, a group who come together because we all have children in the military. We hang a banner in our windows: one blue star for each child currently serving. When a young man or woman is killed in the line of duty, we present a new banner to the family with the blue star replaced by a gold one. On Sunday, our chapter held a ceremony to present gold star banners to the families in our region who deserved but had not yet received one. We all knew it would be a difficult day — those of us with sons and daughters still in harm’s way coming together with those who have lived our worse fear.

I volunteered to speak. I felt I could offer expressions that only a mother could know. When I volunteered, I felt confident that I could do this: stand in front of a group of mothers and talk about our shared experiences and talk about the one thing we don’t share.

I sat at my desk, alone, with the thoughts of what it feels like to raise a son and then watch him go off to war, thinking, writing, crying, erasing, rewriting, weeping, polishing the prose. I practiced reading it and I choked up, tears leaking. I’d set it aside and try it again later. I wondered how I would be able to read this essay I had written, how would I get through it without the words catching in my throat.

By the time Sunday arrived, I had managed to read it through once without breaking down. Just once although I had practiced it over and over. I had a plan that I would make as much eye contact with the audience as possible. That would keep me distracted from the thoughts of my own son still in harm’s way in Iraq. He promised me he would come home safely but face to face with parents whose sons promised the same thing, it was hard not to imagine myself in their place. I would look to the audience to keep me focused on my reading.

Joyce, our chapter president, introduced me and I walked to the podium. I took a deep breath and I started to read. I was fine. I could do this. I looked to the audience as often as I could. I continued on, I read another sentence, a paragraph, and I looked to the audience. I knew not to look at Bobbie because she tears up easily and would get me started, so I looked at Vera. She dabbed at her eyes and I read on. I looked to the opposite of the room but Kathie was crying. I read more and tried to find a face to focus on that was not tear-streaked. I looked to the gold star families but their heads were bowed, unable to watch me at all. And still, I read on and on. I said what I wanted to say, in my own words, in my own voice, and people were moved. When I finished, the room was silent. I didn’t know what to do so I picked up my papers and walked back to my seat. On the way, I could see more clearly the impact my words had made.

What I had created in the solitary moments of my thoughts and words had reached an entire group of people — from all over, all walks of life, all ages, but we all felt the same. I felt humbled by the sweetness of words to do that for us, to bring us together by our common bonds.

Afterwards, my fellow Blue Star Mothers told me that my essay was right on, that was just how it feels to be the mother of a military man. An older man joshed with me that I had made him cry, and members of the Patriot Guard said they weren’t sure they were going to be able to keep it together. Then the father of one of the fallen soldiers said I had made him cry, that he hadn’t done that in awhile, and I didn’t know what to say. Later, Joyce sent an email with this:

One gold star mother told me that they came from Buffalo and ran into a white out in Batavia.  She was anxious and wanted to turn back and her husband told her “NO!  I need to go to this!”  She said he has been so busy taking care of her that he hasn’t had time to grieve himself.  She said our programme gave him the spiritual lift he needed to keep going and face things. 

To think that I might have been part of that lift gives me the strength to keep going, to keep writing, to spending all that time alone in my thoughts with words clustered around me. Because words, maybe even my words, can bring good things.

We are Mothers

Article about the event

Article about the Blue to Gold program (this was published before the event)

When I travel, I like to play a little game I call Treat a Troop. I sneak up behind a soldier making a food purchase and pay for the meal. It sounds easier than it is because I don’t want to be thanked. The perfect scenario is to slip the money to the cashier while the soldier is digging around in his or her wallet, take my change, thank the soldier for their service, and dash away before they figure out what’s going on. I’ve really perfected this technique over the years and it brings me as much joy each time as the first time I successfully treated a troop.

I know my Dad enjoys hearing the tales of my airport adventures. He says he would do it exactly the same way: anonymous is best. So for Christmas this year, I threw down my own gauntlet: I pledged to treat a troop to a sit-down meal in a restaurant. Dad immediately understood the challenges in doing this. First of all, very few traveling troops eat in sit-down restaurants. Take-out is a lot cheaper for them and it’s faster. When I have seen soldiers eating in a restaurant, it’s often a group of 3 or 4. I do have limits to my budget. However, it should be far easier to anonymously pick up a check in a restaurant than slipping into line behind a troop at a fast food walk-up.

I flew to Atlanta on Monday enroute to work in Daytona Beach for the week. It was early when I arrived; breakfast was still being served. After deplaning, I hoisted my computer bag on my shoulder and started toward the gate where I’d get my connection to FL. And then, I saw him. My opportunity. A lone soldier eating breakfast in a restaurant with his back to the concourse.

I entered the restaurant and a waitress told me I could sit any where.

“No,” I said, “I just want to pay for that soldier’s meal.” I nodded towards the young man bent over his plate.

 ”Oh OK,” she said, then turned to go to his table.

“Don’t tell him!” I called after her, and she nodded.

I waited a bit and she returned with the young man’s check.

“Sorry,” she said, “this gentleman is getting it.”

A guy in his 70s with a crew cut and a big belly was right behind her, pulling out his wallet. He was a veteran, I don’t know how I knew, I just did. He had that certain look in his eye that I’ve seen before, the older generation letting this generation know how much they appreciate their service, their continuation of the tradition of duty to their country. I don’t know what he saw in my eye; maybe he recognized me as the mother of a son in Iraq who she tries not to worry about, as clearly as I recognized him as a man who had served. What we both knew about each other was that we both felt responsible for supporting troops in our own way.

He hugged me, pulling me up against his belly, and I hugged him back. I felt his whiskers scratch my cheek as he kissed me, and it reminded me of when my grandfather would do the same. I felt so happy that he was able to pick up the check, and feel the joy of treating a troop.

“As long as it’s taken care of,” I said to the waitress. I left the restaurant knowing that the soldier was taken care of  by one of his own.

I’ll just keep searching for another opportunity to give my father his Christmas present.

It’s been a long time since I visited a college town, even longer since I hung out in a coffee shop in a college town, and I had forgotten about the odd mix that such a place attracts. The man with the wisps of long gray hair at the next table worked on his lap top. He was composing a personal ad for a dating site I didn’t recognize, didn’t really want to know, was a bit scared to know. I averted my eyes, not because I didn’t want to pry (I did), but because it felt like he was engaging in such a personal act in a public place that I ought not look.

Across the cafe, a conversation erupted between three men at two tables. It started with references to Shakespeare and the exultation of the classics, so I thought that the oldest man might be a retired professor. Or maybe that’s the look he had cultivated from years of hanging in a coffee shop in a college town. The youngest man was a student (or had cultivated the look of a student) who spoke of the book he was writing. I knew that type of young man from when I had dabbled at getting a master’s in English: eager and excited and full of literary ambition but doubtful to finish that book when writing faded to something he once did in college after he entered the years of paying his own way in the world, when he discovered there was no luxury of time in which to sit in coffee shops in college towns and boast of the book he was writing. The third man was passing through, closer in age to the young man but not a young man himself. He whisked from topic to topic, two, maybe three sentences per subject before veering off into another direction. He was full of philosophy and caffeine, and wore stringy matted hair and a stained down vest, cleanliness being the handmaiden of the oppressor.

They started with talk of Thomas Jefferson, spoke of Jeffersonian language, Jeffersonian philosophy, feeling uninhibited to freely use a surname as an adjective to any noun. Then the discussion turned to books, the one the young man was writing but would never finish, and the traveling man described a book he would write after traveling the states by Greyhound bus, claiming no one had ever written such a book, or at least hadn’t in a lot of years. Or maybe he would canoe across the Bering Strait, then write a book about it, like The Old Man and The Sea only he would be a younger man and the water would be colder. The other two men knew he was full of shit, as did Tom and I as we listened and pretended to have ceased our own conversation while eating.

At the next table, a young woman’s cell phone rang incongruously with the theme to Sex and The City.

“This is an interesting place,” I whispered to Tom.

“I’ve never seen it quite like this,” he said, but I had a hard time imagining it any other way.

The conversation between the three men careened wildly from one topic to the next. They’d hit one subject squarely, then ricochet off to another, never hitting the brakes but running roughshod from politics to art, the education system to government, always keeping out of reach of practicality. I was enjoying the wild ride, harmlessly full of bullshit and dreams and more bullshit.

I suppose it was inevitable that the conversation would crash into war.

“This guy I knew took a picture of a soldier kneeling at the body of another soldier,” the greasy nomad started. “He wanted to publish it but the military wouldn’t let him.” His voice started to rise. “I’ve worked as a journalist and people have a right to see pictures like that. The government has no fucking right to prevent anyone from printing any picture they want just because they don’t want them to see it!”

I looked at my empty plate, I glanced at Tom, then I watched my plate some more and took even breaths. I considered saying something, I wanted to say something, I wanted to say you can’t just publish any picture you want because, to you that’s a soldier, but to me, that could be my son. The grieving are entitled to their privacy and the military quietly defends that right as strongly as they defend the right to free speech. Soldiers are not uniforms to be treated as nameless, faceless. They are people: sons, husbands, brothers. The families of soldiers deserve privacy in grief; haven’t they given enough without giving up the image of their son to be used at will by strangers spouting off over caffeine in a coffee shop in a college town?

I didn’t say anything. What would be the use? None of the three men would ever actually take such a picture, none would enter a war zone, none would ever see firsthand a soldier salute his fallen buddy,  none would be that soldier, nor his buddy. There is talk and there is action: there are those who sit in coffee shops preaching of the way things should be, and there are those those who quietly pray over the body of one who gave his life in action.

The young man left exhilerated by the talk, the old man cynically shrugged, the nomad tried to rake the snarls out of his matted hair. At the next table, the aged Romeo revised his personal ad one more time.  The young woman closed her cell phone and returned to her conversation with her companion. Tom and I had finished our lunch and so I took my coffee to go, remembering why I so rarely hang out in coffee shops in college towns any more.