Seeing old guys in a new light

Seeing old guys in a new light

While sitting with my par- ents on their porch a few months ago, my dad began to talk about World War II. As I listened to him speak, his voice weakened from having had a dialysis treatment that morning, I tried to picture him as a young man at war. I began to think of his brothers and friends who are in the same shape, or worse. One of them stormed the beaches at Normandy. Another dropped in by air, was captured and became a prisoner of war. One of them was on Iwo Jima when our flag was raised. And there are many others.

This Veterans Day we stop to remember just what these soldiers did for us. As you drive around, remember that the old fellow who made you angry because he wasn’t driving as well as you, might have one day been a young man wading ashore, laden down with a pack and rifle as bullets struck all around him. Ask yourself if you could extend a little patience to him.

Take a good look today at all who share with you God’s Earth. You have no way of knowing which one may have spent their youth on a warship in the Pacific, or a P.O.W. camp, or raised the Stars and Stripes on Mt. Suribachi. In the supermarket, you may be standing next to someone who stood frozen for days in the mud of Korea. You may be holding the door for someone who went months at a time in the wet, dirty, hot jungles of Vietnam. The young men or women you look at angrily because their children are making noise in the restaurant might be home on leave from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Be kind on this day; say a prayer for the fallen, and remember their friends who are still living among us. They remind us that “All gave some, and some gave all.”

Carole Del Genio Moadus, Girard