Most Americans don’t know what happens when a soldier dies in combat.
The soldiers who served alongside wrap their bodies in anything that can pass as a shroud. The deceased is put on a helicopter and sent home.
The first stop along the last journey is when they are packed in ice at the airhead and flown to Europe where they are packed in ice again.
Then they travel to Dover Air Force Base where the body is prepared and meticulously dressed in uniform with the medals that they’ve earned and the emblems of their service.
Then the casualty escort takes them home.
While that happens, casualty officers are placed outside of the homes of the immediate contacts. The officer sits outside waiting for the first light of the day to flick on inside the home.
When the light comes on, the officer approaches the door and knocks, waiting to deliver heartbreak to the person who answers on the other side.
It may be surprising to some of you that I have a lot of friends who are Democrats. It may not be surprising to you that these are mostly millennial aged-people who are college educated.
We keep in touch through social media. For some, their Fourth of July posts were a litany of incendiary statements about how America is not really free, and how there isn’t “justice for all.”
From there came a series of posts showing other flags including those of Palestine and the LGBTQ+ movement.
How could people be so ignorant of the freedoms they’ve been handed on a silver platter? My generation is so entitled and blind to the sacrifices and hardship of previous generations.
Maybe I’m not that way because of my great grandma. I remember being a small girl and finding a box of love letters that my great grandpa had written while oversees to the girl he left behind.
The letters were beautiful and heartbreaking. While he didn’t disclose details, you could tell many of them were written as though he thought they’d be the last he ever sent.
In fact, he was one of the few of his friends that came back.
When he came home he was embroiled in anger and hard to live with.
My great grandma was once asked how she could live with his short fuse. She described, with a little smile, that she told God if he came home alive, she would be by his side forever.
She understood his sacrifice forever changed who he was. The young, handsome blue-eyed boy had seen and done too much that he could never discuss.
I remember seeing the sadness in the eyes of my grandfather, who was never deployed in Vietnam because he had a baby on the way.
But he still couldn’t speak of that era because many of his buddies never came home and the guilt and shame he felt for not having been with them was a weight he could barely carry.
I remember seeing the pictures of my father-in-law in service. I thank him every year, but I never hear any stories of those days.
Undoubtedly they are painful and not worth reliving for a younger generation who could never understand what it was like to be a young man growing up in the military.
In cowboy culture we call old stories “reride tales.” But you don’t hear a lot of those from the veterans in the family.
Instead, we have the Fourth of July. This is the time when we honor the patriotism and freedoms that we have been given.
We reinforce our belief that the Constitution protects us from government overreach; we are rebels and we are free.
We are in a country in which we can peacefully protest, practice our religion freely, voice our ideas and pursue the American dream. Nowhere in the world allows for these freedoms like America does.
The reason is because we were founded under God-given rights, not governmental granted freedoms, a premise so important people died to protect the very idea of the Great American Experiment.
We must take time to get out of our individualistic mindset and trendy causes, to honor the freedoms that we all have.
To say that America is not free because you are on the losing side of political issues dealing with women’s spaces and a war oversees is ignorant.
It is blind to the sacrifices made by 18-year-old boys who became men overnight. Who did things that still haunt their dreams, to protect people they’ll never know.
For every soldier who came home in a pine box, you kick dirt on his grave when you criticize our freedom. It is time to do more and be better. We are one country, under God – and I thank those who lost blood and their families to make sure it stays that way.
It’s time for the whiners to wake up.
Cowboy State Daily columnist Cassie Craven is a University of Wyoming College of Law graduate who practices law in Wyoming. She can be reached at: longhornwritingllc@gmail.com
