Veterans Day

[Jon Brakel]

I was watching a documentary tonight on American POWs from the Vietnam War. It made me remember a moment whose significance didn't register until years later. We had an old pickup camper that we put bumper stickers on from places that we had visited in it. One day I found my Dad in the driveway with a couple of old bumper stickers, a pair of scissors and a stick on letter set. Sometimes we picked up stickers that we thought weren't up to the standards of the old camper and my Dad had rescued a couple of the ones that hadn't made the cut. He had cut out a big WELCOME from one bumper sticker and the word HOME from another and had put them up next to each other. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was making a sticker that he couldn't buy anywhere. Underneath the welcome home he was putting up letters from the letter kit. When he finished it said WELCOME HOME POW/MIA. I was probably not much past kindergarten age when he did this, so I asked him who POW/MIA is. He told me they were Americans who did a job that no one wanted to thank them for and now they were coming home.

It was many years later that I affixed a meaning to those letters and what my Dad had done. I'm sure he did it as much for those kids who came home as he did for a kid named Bud who didn't come home from another war such a long time before.

Peace...

[tree]

Sometimes you can be sooo deeeep! After 20 years you still amaze me!      

[Jon Brakel]

Hey, stop it! Don't you know this is a public forum?  

[tree]

Sorry