Remember Flag Day
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Editor,
Most Americans remember Memorial and Veterans Days with love and sobering patriotism, and rightly so. For me, though, I have to put Flag Day on equal footing.
My Uncle George answered his country’s call into the First Marine Division and ended up in one of the WWII hellholes known as Guadalcanal.
He returned home wounded and nothing like the physical man that left his backwoods home. But that did not stop him from doing carpentry and stonework for many years with one arm, until he regained the use of both. He took no compensation from Uncle Sam until he grew old, so grateful was he to be an American.
To us young ya-hoos, Uncle George was always a walking, stalking backwoods instructor. We laid awake in hunting camp just to hear him occasionally reliving the war in his sleep. We were so very young, too young to understand. Each autumn as I gather up my rifle and sit on some whitetail runway waiting, along the back trails of my memories I see Uncle George, moving so slowly through the woods, with less noise than the breeze that stirs the autumn leaves, and my heart gets full. I can’t help it.
Uncle George loved his family, his God, his country and was helpful to all his neighbors. To these he was always faithful. Were he alive today, I wonder what he would think of the lack of honor back there along the foggy bottoms of the Potomac?
As the hardship of life and age finally overcame his strong spirit, he laid waiting for Him who gave that spirit, to take it back. Looking out the window at the stars and stripes waving in the soft summer breeze, what were his thoughts? As life ebbed away, perhaps he was remembering his fellow Marines who didn’t make it back to the land of the free and home of the brave. It was too much for his weak heart. Uncle George, one of those great Americans, left this old world on Flag Day.
Dale Terrillion
Proctor
