On Kneeling …

Yesterday, I spent two hours with an AT&T tech, fixing an internet snafu at our Little Rock condo. On leaving, I discovered that he had served in the U.S. Army, with assignments in the Middle East, including Afghanistan. He didn’t learn his technical skills there. He served as a medic. My mind shot back to when I was waiting for the bus to take me to the air base at Da Nang to “leave country.”

Amidst the happy, talkative group waiting to go home, there was a young man in a wrinkled outfit with insignia stating that he was a Navy Corpsman. He didn’t talk, just stared through vacant eyes into space. I remember thinking how, after a year in a war zone, I couldn’t imagine what that man had experienced. That’s why I don’t respect people who swagger around with flag decals on their lapels and ask why I don’t wear one.

My oath of enlistment stated that I would “… support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I [would] bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” I’ve researched it numerous times, and I can’t find an exemption limiting that oath to people who look and believe like me.

After we boarded the plane, and it rose aboard the blue waters of the South China Sea, applause broke out. Among the celebrants was a sizable number of shipmates and comrades who, when arriving home would find themselves denied the opportunities and personal safety that I, a white man of Northern European descent, would enjoy. Some had fought their way through Hue, during the Tet Offensive. Some had defended Khe Sahn. Some had held dying friends in their arms. Some had served on riverboat patrols.

All had spent a year or more not knowing what breath they took might be their last.

Some had been called “boy” on the same day they had had suffered wounds on behalf of their country. Some would be stopped for “driving while black” on arrival in an ungrateful country. Some would be denied the opportunity to purchase a home, as I did, in a decent neighborhood. Some would be denied jobs because of the color of their skin.

Their oath of enlistment, which they had fulfilled with honor, was the same as mine.

I think about these things. In the famous line from the movie, they just wanted “their country to love them as much as they had loved it.”

 Kneel for the music, or stand for the music, it’s your right. I don’t give a damn one way or the other, and don’t expect me to. Flag decal or no, standing without having sacrificed will never make you as tall as a kneeling comrade who was shortchanged by the country he served.