Memorials

High atop one of our book shelves is displayed my father-in-law's WWII Val-pak Army suitcase. It can't stand up straight, made of Army green canvas and oxblood leather strapping. But we keep it there because it is authentic. The travel order tags are still tied limply to their metal loops; his name and dog tag numbers are typed there. His helmet is tucked away with some photos of A&M and Army days. In them he resembles a young Frank Sinatra, thin as a reed. His name was Oscar Symms Long.

He told stories of the war, often. He commanded the 756th Tank Battalion, which moved from Algeria, French Morocco to the European Theater. Once the turret of his tank fell on his right hand, just over the fingers. He would have been disabled, his hand crushed, but he was wearing his thick, gold mound of an Aggie ring. The ring saved his hand, as A&M had saved his life--escaping as he did from Depression times into college life as a cadet.

Once his men were in Germany en route to an assignment and they passed a building decorated with a gigantic Nazi flag. He ordered them to climb up and take it down. . . they did so, and he made sure it never flew again. It lies in a family drawer somewhere with other mementos of wartime. . . letters from home. . . passage tickets to places we can't recognize even if we have been to the towns before. The war changed everything in the "civilized" world, forever.

He was decorated for valor; he was humble enough never to raise his profile above the others, as they had all worked as one team. The traumas ran deep--the comradeship closer than blood kin ever can be.

But he always spoke of the war as if it were a thing apart, a life apart, a real-life dream that had vaporized with the gun smoke. His pride ran deeper than trauma or the comradeship or the realities of dreams, and still he was too humble to say so.

We all pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States; we honor the fallen heroes; we save the scraps of tea-colored tags and shreds of their experience. But we can never know the realities of their heartbreak under fire, their courage in the trenches and the cockpits; it will forever be closed to us, and the idea of war--the knowledge that at the most important of times it has saved our freedom, our nation--it's really all we have.

We know that the battles were hard-won. We know that the soldiers saved us. Saved our frame homes on elm-lined streets, the sounds of factory whistles and boys' shouts at baseball practice, still ringing in our heads. Peaceful sounds, even if they call from the distant past.

Realities and dreams intermingle still, even though actual world war has not happened since the 1940s. We owe real debts to real men and women in real wars, so that our dreams can be realized and so that the work of building and keeping the hard realities of democracy can move down the open road.

A sweet line from E.M. Forster's "Howards End," said by Julia Wilcox, the matron of the upper-class family in the mix of characters, sticks in my memories as if I had sat at the table with her.

"I've always had the notion that if we could somehow get the mothers of the world together, then. . . there would be no more war."

As Hemingway said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"