Biography and Autobiography

Home of the Brave: Happy Belated July 4, 2008

Some veterans hold out visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a denticulate scar, a certain look in the eye. Others may carry the attestation inside them: a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg--or perhaps another assort of inner steel: the soul’s ally forged in the refinery of adversity.

Except in parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safety-deposit box wear no badge or emblem. You can’t tell a vet hardly by looking. What is a vet?

He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making steadfast the armored personnel carriers didn’t run out of feed. He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose covered frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of elegant bravery near the 38th parallel. She--or he--is the nurse who fought against futility and went to zizz sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.

He is the POW who went away one human being and came back another--or didn’t come back at all. He is the Quantico bore instructor that has never seen combat--but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and company members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other’s backs. He is the promenade-riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic relief. He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals out of date him by.

He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose company at the Arlington National Cemetery must forever pickle the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor die unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the plethora’s sunless deep....

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