we were soldiers

watching ken burns' the war, i hook into a collective remembrance, a moment in history when america was strong and beautiful. i think of my father and the america he believed in. simply because that's how it was. my father was a jewish boy from a small town in pennsylvania. his parents had fled persecution in russia. and now he was fighting the war in france. an easygoing Gary Cooper type who loved kids and always had gum and candy in his pockets.

he saw the faces of the young boys leaving home for the first time. eyes wide open, hope in their pockets, and duffle bags in hand as they left for the train stations, the bus terminals, the darkened streets at the crack of dawn. he saw the soldiers who risked their lives for people they had never met. he saw bodies herded away in body bags by the thousands--ready to be transported back home to mothers and wives, children who didn't quite understand what it meant that daddy wouldn't be coming home again. he saw all that. and he came back.

there is a beauty in the boys who went over. no, i'm not painting pictures of invincible heroes, but they were heroes. scared as hell some of them, and they were heroes. every last one of them. they gave something of themselves to be over there. those who never came back gave all they had.

and there was a spirit of america. a beautiful spirit. as a country we all pulled together. we had a mutual goal. we knew what we were doing. we were fighting a war that needed to be fought, a war that meant something. we knew we had to win.

people pitched in for the war effort. businessmen, farmers, salesgirls, and secretaries. we worked in factories, managed with less of everything. so we could send more over there. because it was something to believe in. we watched the newsreels and read the reports from war correspondents and letters home. gut-wrenching images of the world at war. when for a time, the devil walked the battlegrounds. because the axis was winning.

but that changed. once our boys were able to let go of what they'd been taught in small towns across america--that killing was wrong. that's what it took. because at large, we were innocents. children with shining eyes and smiling faces, some of us shaking in our boots, but still smiling--headed across the sea. to fight wrong with right. it was a war we could win. and we did.

things are very different now.