Real Heroes

It is possible to love words a little too much. I had started writing this yesterday as a reflection on Veterans Day, and got warped into a rabbit hole vortex of wondering whether it sounds too joyous to say that we "celebrate" the day, a day where probably a lot of Veterans reflect on buddies who didn't make it home. Then I started thinking about the word Hero, about what it really means and how it gets flung around so much it starts to lessen the true meaning. But then I couldn't really come up with just one tried and true meaning of a Hero anyway, and also thought about how probably most Veterans don't like to think of themselves as Heroes. Most veterans I've spoken to, the ones who made it back home, use the word Lucky more than anything else.

I was thinking too much about words and the various subjective meanings everyone applies to make things fit neatly into whatever they're talking/writing about and my head started spinning.

Then I thought about how words can suddenly shrink down and feel totally puny when put into context with Action. It's not that words are meaningless--far from it--but sometimes they take a little bit of a back seat. Words are the way the story gets told, but they can't capture the essence of certain things, these universally huge things that we have important words for, like Sacrifice, Courage, Valor, Honor, Duty, Country. These words get close but still don't quite capture It (whatever it is), and it's hard to know how to feel let alone what to say.

I finally realized I should just write about a couple moments in my life where I truly understood what I idolize in certain people.

My Dad is a 1968 West Point graduate. He and my Mom married in June of '68, and from what I understand Dad was sent more or less straight from West Point to Vietnam. Of all the incredible stories I've heard about his service, two moments truly stand out for me:

1. Joining Dad at a West Point class reunion at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC, and shaking the hand of man who told me, "Your father is a good man. He saved my life." I'd never heard that story before, and Dad would never say that he saved another person's life, even though that appears to be exactly what he did. I bet what he'd say is that he did exactly what any of those other guys would have done for him.

2. Going through my parents' record collection one holiday, pulling out Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water LP, and listening to Mom talk about how she used to listen to that record, and the title song in particular, and pray for her husband to make it home safely. It was already one of my favorite records, but now I truly save it for sacred listens, imagining the power that song must have awakened in my mother, helping her hold on just a bit longer. When I really think about it, it shakes me to my core.

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At my grandma's funeral this past September, there were so many incredible older photographs I'd never seen before. But the one at the top of this page made me need to sit down for a bit and think about the It (whatever it is) I was talking about above. That photo is of my grandpa (on my mother's side) in uniform with my grandma and their first child; it was his first time with his wife and first child after coming home from Okinawa.

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Driving around Somerville yesterday I remembered that Sgt. Henry O. Hansen Memorial Park is just down the street from where I live. Hank Hansen was born in Somerville, Mass. in 1919, graduated from Somerville High and joined the Marines at age 18. He was killed at Iwo Jima, apparently by a sniper while being treated for wounds, on March 1, 1945; he was 25. (Both the book and movie Flags of our Fathers, and the Japanese counterpart Letters from Iwo Jima, tell the incredible story of this battle and all the subsequent drama that played out, and are definitely worth checking out, by the way). I'm not sure if it's attributed to Sgt. Hansen, but either way the inscription on a piece of granite in the memorial captures It:

When you go home

Tell them for us and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today.

There are so many other men and women out there just like these folks, and you're not likely to read too much about them, which I submit is not an accident. A journalism professor of mine at Richmond told me that, "for the most part, the people you read about in newspapers are people who want to be read about. It's the quiet folks who have the way more powerful stories inside them." 

It's very easy to talk superficially about things like Selflessness, Sacrifice, Valor, Courage, etc. It's quite another thing entirely to truly Give Yourself Up for Something/Someone Else, even if that something else is unnameable. Putting mere words and feeling into Action and embodying It takes Power on such a different level that, I think if you have that power, the thought of turning it into a story simply does not register. That's for somebody else to do.  

And that's the best part: Thanks to folks like the ones I mentioned--trust me, I simply believe deep down that there are so many others just like them, and they are very quiet and very amazing people--thanks to these people, most of us won't need to define It; putting It into the perfect wording isn't necessary. All we need to do is try our best to Remember as often as possible.