Finding the path to thanks

My path to understanding has had some turns.

What young boy didn’t covet ownership or the chance to play Army, whether with friends outdoors or within the coziness of your room, the “soldiers” measuring mere inches.

I sure did, without truly understanding what was at play beyond the television or movie screen, where everything that I knew about war and the military was abstract, from the rushing toward bullets to the deaths.

On a black and white television, on shows like “Combat” reality always rested at arm’s length.

The first reality of the military in memory, in fact, was negative.

Like many of my generation, I came of age after the Vietnam Conflict had turned from war against communism supported at home into a conflict with no clear end or objective that divided the country.

I lived a few blocks from a college campus and in those days the green uniform of the military was cause for rage, for anger, because men, such as one of my older brother’s best friends, were fighting and dying in a war seemingly without end.

It was a war captured starkly in photos – of an enemy soldier being executed in the streets with a shot to the head, a little girl running, naked and burned, her village aflame in the background, to the last helicopter, crammed with desperate people, lifting from the roof the U.S. Embassy.

Vietnam also brought the first of what is now taken for granted in the information age – television reporting, by stalwarts such as Dan Rather, Morley Safer, Richard Jennings and many more, from the jungles where bullets screamed overhead and men fought for yards of ground.

At that time, Clifford Sims was not even on my radar.

As peacetime reigned, my younger brother and I talked of going into the Marines under the buddy system, but I decided I liked the college life more – too dadgum fun – and he went off for four years, blacksmithing his body against the anvil of the military regimen, seeing the world and coming out with a career that has served him well.

As did mine, after college decided that, for the time, it was pretty much done with me.

I followed what I was pursuing in college and that led me to a career in security, first at Disney World and then, as security morphed into loss prevention, with Marriott and a string of hotels.

I thrived, but so too did my brother and I pondered with unfailing curiosity what the military had offered my brother, what had he taken away that so improved him as a, cliché alert, productive and constructive person.

Those lessons did not seem to come as easy to me.

And in time, life interceded and I found this part of the world, went back to college, earned my degree requirements and an internship that was the launching pad for a second career that has spanned two decades and pointed me, ultimately, to this place and time.

And slowly, as a dripping faucet fills a bucket, my understanding and gratitude filled me.

I learned about the life of Clifford Sims and the sacrifices he made in those jungles I had seen on television and now watched on cable. I began to understand the why.

I met Capt. Dave Maddox, the late George Core and other county residents part of the Greatest Generation – they surely existed throughout my journey, but I certainly did not notice or appreciate them – and who had fought in World War II.

By meeting and interviewing them, suddenly history, particularly war history, was my main subject at the library and bookstore.

The why was becoming less murky, less opaque.

In the past few years, this community has welcomed the Semper Fi Sisters, moms, wives, sisters, aunts of loved ones in the military, who are a constant reminder that we have been a nation at war for a decade and men and women fight and die each day to protect our right to, for example, text message while driving.

The Wounded Warrior weekends I have been privileged to report on drive home the costs borne by what Tom Brokaw calls the real 1 percent – the 1 percent of our population that bears 100 percent of the current burden of wartime.

The why getting clearer all the time.

I met some of those men and women who went off to war, had the chance to speak to them from war zones, and more and more the why was less elusive.

I came to cover annual Veterans Day events in this county that bring chills and moisten eyes. To hear Taps played now, to hear the ringing of the bell in remembering those who did not return, brings the why into more focus.

Because the why is really, I have found, pretty straightforward among those in uniform, who have sacrificed, who have lost limbs and buddies and too often carry unseen scars out of the fog of war.

The country called.

Yes, there are those for whom the military offers a positive passage into adulthood, the chance to learn a trade and fashion a career, but for a vast majority, at least in my experience, the why, especially since 9/11, was as simple as a country in need.

In need of men and women willing to set aside the inevitable fear of the war zone and stand, fight, defend freedoms and tenets set down more than 200 years ago.

Maybe that is what my brother learned in the military, the tamping of ego for the whole, the discipline of sacrifice, the ability to rise above all too human frailties for a country born of a theory.

I have finally understood, from this community, the why and with it comes the humble thanks to the military we salute this week – and should each of the other 51.