Over the last few weeks, the classes that I teach have been studying Homer's The Odyssey. Every year when we get to Odysseus' homecoming, we show a video to our classes of some of our military heroes coming home and being reunited with their family members, many of them unexpectedly. Every single time, every class, every year I'm brought to tears when I see these heroes seeing their kids for the first time in a long time. Those heroes who volunteered to go into harm's way because it needed to be done, pick up and hold their kids. A little girl buried her face in her Daddy's brauny shoulder; his rough, weathered, war-trained hands held his baby girl. One mountain of a man in fatigues picked up his boy and just swallowed him up in his arms and held him for several minutes with tears rolling down his sun and wind-burned crag of a face. I saw fathers bury their faces into the hair of their toddlers. (If you're not a parent that probably sounds weird, but Daddy's, you know that sweet smell.) I saw fathers kiss the sons they had let go, praying that they would see them again in this world. Warriors walked the steps onto the front porches where only a few years prior they had run in from school or glanced back from their neighborhood baseball games to see if the porch light had come on yet to call them home. Whenever you see these heroes, you make sure that they know that you support them. If you know the family of one of these heroes, you take care of them. They have hard lives, and I've never heard one of them complain. Let your representatives, senators and the president himself know that you don't appreciate them putting politically motivated restrictions on them at every turn. Such restrictions usually end up costing precious lives, but satisfy some whiny pseudo-intellectual terrorist sympathizer who thinks he knows more about warfare than our military does.
Gentlemen, honor and stand by our military and our veterans. Fight for them at home while they fight for us far from home. Ours is the easier fight. We ask everything of them; they don't ask much of us. They shouldn't have to ask.