Opinion : Why those who receive honor from veterans still clap for them

It was inspiring, on Thursday night, when the Vinton Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8884 presented me with an award, then gave me a standing salute.

It should have been the other way around.

The vets were thanking me for the articles I have written about veterans, and about their group.

If I write more about veterans than others, it’s because of a profound respect I have for what they have done – especially when I think of how little I have done in terms of serving my country.

I come from a long line of 4Fs. My great-grandpa was too old when WWI began. My grandfather had broken his leg in a horse vs. car incident and was unable to participate in WWII. My dad, nearly legally blind in his left eye, did not go to Vietnam. Me, I was never officially declared 4F, but if the recruiters who called me had known about my torn ACL in my left knee and a severely torn hamstring (not to mention my all-around physical ineptitude), they would have moved on to the next guy on the list.

Many of the Closes who grew up around me did indeed wear official government uniforms and spent a lot of time in close quarters. 

The closest thing I have to a war hero in my family is my cousin Mike. Actually my dad’s first cousin, Mike served in Vietnam and was shot in the leg. I remember being in awe of him when I saw him in the early 1970s, when he still walked with a cane.

I saw Mike a couple of years ago, and asked him about his knee.

“Which one?” he replied.

Turns out that in the past few years, the knee he hurt in high school sports has been giving him more trouble than the one that got shot up in Vietnam.

Although my family tree has not given me the opportunity to know soldiers who have come home from war with real experiences and long-lasting pain my job has.

This job has taught me that it’s possible to respect the burdens a soldier or sailor has borne, without having borne them yourself.

One of the VFW members is Don Roepke from Brandon. I asked Don a while ago if it’s likely that soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan will join groups like the VFW when they return.

No, said Don, who tells me it was 20 years after he left the Navy before he joined the VFW.

Most of those returning from war, he explains, do not want anything to do with any groups that have anything to do with that subject. It takes years before they even consider joining such organizations.

I have never been in their shoes, but I can appreciate why they would prefer to forget about war for a while. The veteran who presented me my award, is helping other soldiers live with the memories of the trauma they saw and experienced. As a WWII medic who had to determine which soldiers could be saved, Gualtier had already seen way more than any 18-year-old should. Then they sent him to liberate concentration camps.

As I thanked the veterans, I thought of all the things I just wrote, and then I remembered something I saw on the back of the t-shirts worn by those who welcome WWII veterans to Washington, D.C., for the Honor Flights.

“We can’t all be heroes,” Mark Twain has been credited with saying. “Some of us have to stand on the curb and clap as they pass by.”

A few of those heroes clapped for me the other day.

We should never stop clapping for them.