I finished my PhD, moved to Boston, didn’t get a teaching job. Penniless, I
had to do something. I worked for temp agencies. In 2000, I got a trial job
writing articles for the Lexington Minuteman. $40 an article, 5 articles a
week, I starved.
It changed my life.
One of the first assignments my editor gave me was an interview with a man
who finally got a purple heart for bravery…55 years after the fighting
stopped.
Hmmm. I smelled a good story.
Lexington is a wealthy town. I drove to a back street of well-kept houses,
coiffed lawns, sunshine shimmering through the maples. John, slightly
stooped, 80-some years old, answered the doorbell.
He shuffled into the kitchen. “Sit down, sit down.” Sunlight streamed
through the window, onto the table. I dutifully got out my notebook. His
eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, his skin mottled with age.
A velvet covered box sat on the table. He opened it to show me his
purple heart. I asked, “What did you do to get it?”
World War II. John was a young company commander. His orders came
through, and they must’ve filled him with dread. His company was to take a
village, across the river, where the Nazis were deeply entrenched.
At the break of dawn, under heavy enemy fire, he and his men jumped into
rowboats. They rowed across the river. Men were shot on the seats around
him and fell screaming into the water. His company made the bank and
charged up a steep incline. The village was a couple hundred yards away,
across a flat open field. The German bullets tore into his men as they ran,
and they died where they fell.
In the village they fought the Nazis house to house, room to room,
sometimes with bayonets and knives. Men died, too many to count. Many more
men suffered wounds and lay bleeding on the ground. By dusk, they had
managed to clear the village of Germans.
I will never forget what he said then. “Most of the wounded didn't
live through the night.”
“Why?” I asked. “Did they bleed to death?”
He shook his head. “We were in Belgium. It was the middle of winter.
They froze to death. In the morning, most of them were frozen to the
ground.”
Sitting at his kitchen table, I saw that he was re-experiencing his
feelings of that morning, the terror and sadness, the losses. All those
torn and dead young men. All those parents and wives, back home, whose
lives were shattered. All those children who had lost their father. I could
see the suffering he had lived with for all those decades, plain on his
face.
John sniffed once. The silence condensed. We looked at each other. I
couldn’t speak.
John’s story did something to me. Before that morning I never really
felt how much I love America. I never realized, until that day, that I’d
give my life for America. No doubt in my mind. I would bleed every single
ounce of my blood into the soil for my country, and I would consider it a
fair price for the life I have led.
I have lived a free man.
America is the birth place of freedom in the world, and its very
foundation. That freedom has been bought with the blood of all those who
died in our fight for independence, and for the freedom of those we
enslaved, and later, for the freedom of our brethren on foreign soils.
Freedom is not an idea. Freedom is a state of being. Our freedom has been
brought forth out of the darkness of our terrible fears, and the ravings of
lunatics. It has been paid for with the blood of men.
John is probably dead now. I met him seventeen years ago. To this
day, when I remember his story, I still cannot speak. I cannot find the
words to voice my profound sadness, my gratitude, and my love.
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=icon>
Virus-free.
www.avast.com
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=link>
<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
