Generations singing out in the sweet land of liberty
My 9-year-old son has begun singing in the shower.
His shower songbook consists entirely of military anthems, the official hymns of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard.
While he’s soaping up, I hear his soprano voice wafting through the house: “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,” he trills; and then, lowering his voice a bit for emphasis, “From the halls of MonTEE-zu-ma.”
The thirdgraders at his school performed a musical tribute to veterans earlier this month in honor of Veteran’s Day. In addition to learning about a dozen patriotic songs by heart, my son got to carry the Coast Guard flag onto the school stage. This is a responsibility he took extremely seriously.
“Daddy, I’m afraid I’ll fall down walking onto the stage,” he fretted before the program began.
I asked him afterward why he didn’t volunteer for the percussion parts: snare drum, base drum and cymbals. He looked at me quizzically. “Daddy, nothing is more important than carrying a flag,” he
said, as if he felt a little awkward having to explain this well-known fact to a grown man.
During the anthem medley, veterans in the audience were asked to stand when their branch of the military was mentioned. It was a moving sight. The crowd began to applaud as each cluster of vets took their feet.
Watching my son sing the military songs, my thoughts drifted back to my deceased father, a Korean War veteran who left part of his heart and much of his health on the frigid battlefields of the Forgotten War. He died 13 years before my younger son was born.
In a flash of insight, I realized that I could mentally draw a straight line from my father’s military service to this cute, blond grandson he never knew, who was living an idyllic middle-class life in one of the most beautiful communities in the freest nation on earth.
None of that is accidental or without cost.
Like American soldiers throughout history, my father fought for his unborn children and even grandchildren whom he would never know.
When I hear reports about the squalid living conditions and systematic oppression of people in North Korea, I think about my father and his Army buddies who delivered the South from a similar fate. It hit home when I read recently that North Koreans are notably smaller than South Koreans because of decades of famine in the North.
My younger son, of course, has only the vaguest understanding of armed conflict, although his country has been at war for his entire life. My 14-year-old son, who was born about a week before the 9-11 attacks, has similarly never known peacetime in America.
At the elementary school music program, an older gentleman — probably in his 80s — was sitting in front of me, a cane resting between his knees. When the children began singing the Marine anthem, he stood up, ramrod straight. From where I sat, I could see tears pooled on the back of his glasses.
“He’s about the age Dad would have been,” I thought, comforted that someone from my father’s generation was soaking in this outpouring of patriotism by these angelic 8- and 9-yearolds.
On the way home, my son expressed great relief that he had made it through the program without tripping. Then, after a few moments of silence, his tiny little voice rang out from the back seat: “My country ‘tis of thee. Sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing.”
A thought sprang to mind — fully formed — as if to put a period on a lifetime of ambivalence about how my father’s war experience had effected him and our family.
“Thank you, Dad,” I whispered. “Rest in peace. Your suffering was not in vain.”
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/ mkennedycolumnist.