On This Year’s Veterans Day

November 9, 2024

I’ve driven home from Williamsburg a hundred times, at least a dozen pulling a trailer with my daughter’s precious horse inside. I certainly know the way. But as I got in my car to leave the VAASL annual conference Friday afternoon, deeply inspired once again by those gifted and devoted school librarians, I offhandedly checked my phone for directions, just to see how much traffic I’d be dealing with on I-64. It offered to save me a half hour going a different way, wiggling at first through the back edge of the ‘burg. It was a beautiful afternoon, the last tawny hues of fall sweeping through trees and spilling down in late-day sunbeams, so I decided to take it.

I’m so glad I did. Because it led me to my father.

I didn’t consciously know it—but given the national decision of the past week, and what it implies about us—I needed to stand on the edge of his childhood farmland—to let the stubborn, defiant tenacity of his soul seep into mine. That farm boy who survived multiple personal tragedies, the Great Depression, and then horrors of WWII.  Especially on the eve of this Veterans’ Day.

Some of you may know my first novel, Under a War-torn Sky. It’s inspired by my father’s experiences as a B-24 bomber pilot and the French civilians who helped him evade the Nazis. Henry Forester is fictionalized, researched and crafted to be an “everyman” flyer, representative of thousands of boys who fell out of burning planes onto Nazi-occupied France. “Ordinary” boys who had to go off and fight the war Hitler’s hatred and bigotry wrought, whose courage and comradery were anything but ordinary. Boys who, like my father, managed to hang onto their humanity, their capacity for kindness despite the carnage they witnessed and the cruelty they might have experienced, as did my father (and the character Henry) at the hands of the fanatical, white nationalist Gestapo.

I should explain why finding my way there was a surprise. Daddy was a late-in-life baby for his parents, as I was for him. The farm had already been sold when I was a toddler. I’d only seen it once before, long ago. And my own then small children and I lost Daddy 24 years ago—to skin cancer caused by his childhood of broiling while working those wide-open vegetable fields. I have never stopped missing him.

About 15 minutes into my detour, I reached State Route 5, a two-lane road that snakes through thick groves of pine-oaks and dogwood, and alongside glistening Tidewater marshes. The original colonial road heading west to the outpost of Richmond from the settlement of Williamsburg, it parallels the James River—offering glimpses of that wide, deep, fast-moving water, miles of fields now stubbled with harvested corn, and the occasional welcome signs of homes built in the 1700s. It’s beautiful. Scenes Daddy had described with such love.

So, I started searching as I drove, remembering Daddy’s descriptions of their farm backing up to the James, that it straddled two county lines, the creeks bordering their fields, where he fished and swam, after brutal hours of farm chores. God bless the red truck behind me, because he tolerated my repeatedly slowing down to peer left toward the river, then speeding up again.

I finally found it, veering over abruptly. And felt my heart well up standing at the bottom of the long narrow lane, flanked by two rows of cedar trees he’d described walking down to make the trek to school, ruining his Buster Brown shoes one day by kicking a rock as he went.

Over 90 years later, those cedars are still there, spindly like very old men, but exuding a sense of fortress refusing to yield. Up that lane stands the clapboard cottage he, as a teenager, helped his father build after the family home burned down. Right in the middle of the Depression.

(Daddy had grown up in a small brick house built in the early 1800s—no heat or electricity or indoor plumbing—a fireplace in every room that he helped stoke each morning, lit by kerosene lamps. They think it was one of those lamps that somehow caught fire when his mother had driven him to a boy scout meeting. They’d returned to find the house in flames, his father trying desperately to pull precious belongings out. That isolated, in the middle of the Great Depression, no fire truck existed to come. One of the few things my grandfather managed to save was a beautiful hand-embroidered shawl he’d brought home to his wife, when he returned from helping build the Panama Canal. He was a surly, tough-love type, but his love for his wife ran deep.)   

Standing at the bottom of the drive, listening to dry leaves rustling as they swirled around on the gravel, nudged along by a slight river-fresh breeze, I marveled at that little cottage and the resolve it took for them to camp out in a chicken coup for months as they built it. They didn’t give up. They didn’t throw around blame about who might have failed to blow out the wick of those kerosene lamps.

I let my heart fill up with my family’s one-foot-in-front-of-the-other perseverance. Their spit, as Daddy would call it.

I share this with you on Veterans’ Day, for several reasons. The shocked dismay of those school librarians at VAASL was heartbreaking. Their jobs are about to become even more difficult. Many asked me, thinking out loud, often tearfully: what do I say to my students? What do I say to my teen girls about our electing an adjudicated rapist, who uses such crude language to demean women and brags on grabbing their genitalia? What do I tell the boys about respect, about consent, standing up to bullies, not ridiculing others? 

I’ve also been thinking of our veterans—of my father’s contemporaries and those Cold War warriors who risked so much to hold the line against Soviet Russia’s desire to swallow up all Europe after forcibly occupying its eastern half post-WWII—with a sense of shame. How could we elect a man who calls our veterans “suckers and losers?”

Standing under those gnarled, bodacious cedars, calling up the echoes of my father’s voice, I felt my shoulders square. Our house has just burned down. And we need to rebuild—plank by plank. There’s much self-examination and redefinition to be done. But right now, let's begin with this: today, please find a veteran and tell them—making sure they are really hearing and absorbing—thank you for your service. These brave souls are anything but “losers.”