Published

Well, the day arrived unexpectedly yesterday. The day every author waits for to be able to declare themselves an official writer - publication.

Monday morning I wrote a short story on a service project some youth from my church did here in my city. They placed flags on gravesites at a local veteran's cemetery. My good friend took some beautiful pictures and I sent them out to a myriad of local newspapers, hoping for some human interest coverage. On a whim, I sent the story to a national publication. By Tuesday morning, I had received an email from a colleague congratulating me on my story - published by the national paper. Today it is their top story.

It speaks to the state of our nation, I think, that a story about teenagers placing flags on graves would be national news. You see, they're not just any teenagers. They are children of military families. It also speaks to the state of our nation that my story has not received any local coverage. Not a bite. You see, I live in a military town. Here it is not big news that children have parents who are deployed. Here people honor veterans and soldiers ever single day. It's nice to place flags on veterans' graves, but we give our fathers, our husbands, our brothers and our mothers to this country every single day. We send them off for months at a time, wondering if they will return. We go to birthday parties and meet gold star wives - women widowed by the ravages of war. We have displays at school showing how many veterans are connected to the children there and we see row after row after row. We have breakfasts with veterans where many men and women show up in uniform to eat with school children knowing there are many, many more who wish they could, but are eating MRE's in the desert thousands of miles away from their children. We don't need to wear yellow ribbons or fly flags to remember our veterans. Our loved ones wear the flag every day on their uniforms and the strings pulled on our hearts from here to wherever they are too long and too strong to be represented by a little yellow string.

I wondered yesterday, as the nation celebrated Veteran's Day, if they thought of my friends, my neighbors. I wondered how many private citizens took the time to honor a soldier, a veteran in some way. I wondered as they went about their lives, grocery shopping, working, flying on a business trip, if they recognized that every piece of that freedom was bought by a soldier. It was bought by his family, by his children who sacrifice each day without him home, praying for his safety. Each moment of freedom in this nation is a moment someone sacrificed for.

So if my story touched anyone, lent any light or hope about our country, I am grateful. But my greater hope would be that the story would prompt a flood of gratitude to our soldiers, to their families, to their children. They are the ones who need to be remembered and recognized. They are the ones who are powerful and resilient and amazing.

I hope that one day these beautiful young people will not have to know the normalcy of sacrifice that exists here. I wish I could write a piece that would be the top story here, one that meant our soldiers were safe, our families were together and they wouldn't have to leave again. I long for the front page story of freedom from oppression, from hatred, from war. Until that happens, I hope that their sacrifices are never forgotten. I hope there's not an American soldier alive who thinks his efforts aren't appreciated or remembered by his countrymen.

I hope we as a country never forget how we got our freedom - now that would be newsworthy.

Photo by Amanda Anderson