How a Stray Bull Taught me about Memorial Day

I remember feeling a sense of excitement as my father and I saddled up our horses.  I was finally old enough to go on one of these special "working cattle" moments.  Our new, young bull had decided to go check out greener pastures.  He had broken through the fence and gotten on to my uncle's land that bordered ours.  Retrieving a stray bull could be a dangerous enterprise. Most of the time if a bull has broken through a fence, he don't want to go home.  Growing up on a dairy farm and ranch operation afforded me some unique opportunities, this was to be an unexpected one.

As we rode onto my uncle's ranch, we came through some thick brush and into a clearing.  The ground in that clearing had an odd bowl shaped depression in it and in the middle of that depression was a granite tombstone type marker.  As we got closer, I could see it had some military markings on it and there was a short list of names.  I had never seen such a marker and inquired about it.  My dad told me the story, one he had never shared with me.

During World War II, just a few days before my father shipped off to serve in the Navy, a German submarine had been supposedly sighted in the Gulf of Mexico.  A bomber had been dispatched out of a base in San Antonio to go check it out.  It was after dark that night that the plane had mechanical problems and crashed into the ground there on my uncle's land on its way to the Gulf.  The plane caught fire as it crashed, the bombs exploded and all the men on board died.

My father told me that he was visiting his sister and brother in law that night, they heard the plane go down and explode.  They rushed to the scene and started to call out to see if there were any survivors.  They heard others shouting from the other side of the crash site and were in hopes that maybe someone had bailed out and survived.  But after some time of investigation and wandering around in the dark, they found that it was another group of people who saw the explosion and drove to the site.

It did not seem easy for my father to tell this story, that was part of the reason I had never heard it before. He was days away from leaving for the war and here a group of men had just died in a that war, almost literally in his back yard.  He probably never told me all that he saw that night.  It was a sobering event; the war, in a sense, had come home to him.

It was a story and a sight, that I have never forgotten.  It would be some time later that it would dawn on me - a group of men died for our country just a few miles from where I grew up, not in some distant land but right here.  There is a sense that it came home to me that these men died for me, they died for us.  They would never get the story or the honor of those who died in the act of combat overseas.  Yet they had still laid down their lives.  Their families suffered the same sense of loss, cried the same type of tears and endured the same years of living with out a loved one. 

My father went off to that war and came home.  I was born as a result.  Those men never came home and never had children.  They still gave their lives along with the 1.3 million men and women who have given their lives defending our country since the Revolutionary war.  We have cause to be grateful.  This weekend, I pray that no one dies on a military operation and I also pray that we would become more grateful because of those who have.  Let's let their sacrifice come home to us.

for the journey...

Tim