Cassi Creek: My
friend, Paul Scotton, sent me his good wishes for Veterans’ Day. He attached a graphic he found, thinking it
would amuse me.
He’s right,
it does amuse me.
Since becoming a world power, the U.S. soldier has presented
a strong presence to the world. The long
line of men and women who made up the previous generations of our armed forces
have cast a larger than life shadow in many desperate battles around the
globe. We’ve earned that larger shadow
with our bodies and our lives, and those of our friends and families. Then we’ve done what all soldiers do, we’ve
aged, we’ve gained weight, we’ve acquired diseases that sap our strength and willpower.
Our bodies
have let us down. But the image we see
in the mirror when we look to be sure that we’re still there is only one of two
images. We see the older people with
gray hair and deep wrinkles. We see the
tremors and feel the loss of balance.
There remains
another image. Like the man at the WWII
monument, we still see the shadow we cast when we were soldiers. We’ve lost our durability but we’ve not lost
the bits of self that allowed us to see who we had to be
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