I Take Them To Battlefields

I have several young nephews who will come over quite a bit, I take them out on adventures so they can get something of it. Some folks would go to Disneyland, go on rides that make them squeal, that’s fine enough, but I instead take those kids to battlefields. Not active ones, I’m not mad, but those ones etched in history, am fortunate to have several that are not that far from me. Those boys have walked Saratoga, where the tide of a war changed, stood on Fort William Henry’s walls were countless cannon balls rained. They have seen Ticonderoga, once key to the whole continent, and walked the Massachusetts’ decks, where sixteen-inch guns did vent. They’ve watched soldiers wheel in a line, recreating our distant past, and seen the tools of Vietnam with a veteran of that class. Learned how their great grandfathers both played their part in World War II, that one nearby dies on Iwo, but the shell had a faulty fuse… That he was one of that mad bunch who charged though those coal-black sands, where Japanese would cry,”medic!” then would coldly shoot a man… Some would like them to forget, want them to remain ignorant, the past won’t fit their narratives, they see it as impediment. But those boys have to understand, one bad day, we wouldn’t exist. Our forefathers died for this land, I owe it to them to persist. They’ll know the cost of freedom is sometimes so brutally high, I take them to battlefields so the truth of us will survive.