Category: Personal

Amer­i­cans are good at telling war sto­ries; yet there aren’t many worth telling since World War II. We’ve spilt a lot of blood since then — lit­tle of it right­eous. Most war sto­ries from the sec­ond war to end all wars don’t spark my patri­o­tism — which is deep, and qui­et, like my grand­fa­ther’s.

A war sto­ry with a per­son attached to it affects me dif­fer­ent­ly. Like my grand­fa­ther’s. Some­one who put down their civil­ian life, strove extra­or­di­nar­i­ly to do a job that need­ed to be done, and with great equa­nim­i­ty either went into a hole in the ground or returned to their day-by-day. That’s the arche­type that reminds me to help Amer­i­ca become a place wor­thy of the sac­ri­fices they made; with no expec­ta­tion of glo­ry or reward, but sim­ply because the job was there to do. Like my grand­fa­ther.