No Regrets

I told a friend tonight, who asked me to post something positive, that I would, and I will I told her, I have something in mind, and I do.

This is not it, it will come soon enough, in a day or two. It is being written in my head as most things are before I set them down. The thought comes. It becomes an idea and then the idea is put into words. So to my friend, it is now a thought that has become an idea that will in a day or two be put in words and posted here.

But meantime on this day of celebration and reflection, a day on which the below haunting anthem was invoked(I think by President Biden and how grand it is to say that title and name together) I got to thinking as we all got to thinking.

One of the things I thought about is that among the many I know from my time,I am one of the few who did, who served. No, nothing heroic, not close, not hardly. Got lucky, got orders for Panama after basic and infanty training at Ft. Dix.

I ended up working in an office at USARSO, which stood for United States Army Southern Comand – all of Latin America. I wore a USARSO patch on my uniform as I spent my 17 months at Ft. Amador in the then Canal Zone, safely ensconed in an office clerk’s job with a permanent pass in my pocket and Panama City a very few miles away, and at the end went home safe and sound — even as casualties mounted in Vietnam.

But, I do not regret it. I do not regret that in these oh so fraught times I can say this: I don’t know about you, but I served.

And in serving I learned a lot that I took with me these 50 years since about people, about the people who do.

So I know how little soldiers really could know when first they are sent into battle. I know – absent extraordinary luck – I would not have had the reflexes to survive. I have always known that, known it since basic training even when I was young and quick.

But I didn’t get called to do that, didn’t have to and so I have lived all these years since and thought about a few in my basic company and then my infantry training company and wondered, wondered if they made it out. Did you make it out and home Willis? I wish I knew.

But – but I’ve lived ever since with a sense of what it could be like, and how much so, for anyone to whom it ever fell to be called to battle for this country of ours, to be called in the words of this anthem, to give their best.

Listen now to that “American Anthem” because part of bridging the gap,ending the “uncivil war” as the president correctly called it today, is to end indifference or, worse, diffidence for those those who do.