Essay: Veterans Day Salute, in Words and Video
The Next Time: You experience a rush of road rage because you are behind a hesitant and slow elderly driver on the interstate, a man so shriveled with age that you can’t even see his head above the headrest, consider the possibility that, as a young man, he sat tall and strong as he maneuvered a U.S. Army tank across the desolate battlefields of Europe under the command of Gen. George S. Patton.
The Next Time: You are chafing because you are behind a woman holding up the checkout line as her gnarled hands struggle to grasp the coins in her purse, consider the possibility that, as a young Army nurse, those self-same hands nimbly and gently nursed the wounds of a dying soldier, providing his only comfort in his final moments in a strange land, far from hearth and home.
The Next Time: You get riled because you are stalled in an airplane aisle behind an old man who is struggling to put his luggage in the overhead rack, consider the possibility that, decades ago, he was one of the few pilots at Pearl who was able to run to his plane under catastrophically deadly enemy fire and get airborne to answer the Japanese onslaught.
The Next Time: You get angry waiting for an old gentleman to get on an elevator to descend because the delay might make you miss a meeting, consider the possibility that, as a muscular young lad barely out of his teens, he descended on a parachute behind enemy lines, under withering fire from Nazi troops, to fight for your freedom.
The Next Time: You silently ridicule an old man struggling to exercise, although he is barely able to walk, as he goes through the motions of running on the same path you zip along on, consider the possibility that he once resolutely struggled for his life as he was starved, taunted and tortured during the 60-mile Bataan Death March, barely surviving that ordeal while thousands of his colleagues fell dead along the way.
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