Allow me to share an Independence Day memory appropriate for Veterans' Day.
The annual Independence Day parade in the small town of Washington, NJ.
With the family, with hundreds of others, sitting on the curb in the glorious summer sun, watching and cheering the bands, the veterans, the flags as they go by, getting up only to change position, or grab a drink, or see around an obstruction. We see the flag, and it is there as a part of the parade, along with the tanks, the ambulances and fire trucks, and the haywagon from which candy is thrown to the kids. We sit and watch and enjoy.
He arrives in a wheelchair, pushed by his elderly daughter, an old, old man dressed in his doughboy uniform, like him preserved lovingly across the gulf of years, carefully pressed, hat brim adjusted with great attention.
He is wheeled to the curb and appears, despite the sad fog of advanced age, to be enrapt in the parade. In his mind he is here and he is somewhere else, a terrible place that we cannot imagine and he can never really leave.
A flag approaches. We cheer and clap. With one shaking hand he lifts himself from the chair, standing on wobbling legs that once climbed out of some trench and charged the German lines through fog, mud, bullets and barbed wire, he stands, and slowly and steadily, raises his hand to his hat brim and salutes the flag.
A bit less cheering, then, a few tears, and a very different meaning to the parade, as we who had been sitting so comfortably, stand as the flag passes by.
He had one last act to do for his country, and he did it with dignity. May God bless his memory, whoever he was.