Sitting in the Mockingbird coffee house in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, listening to young boys talk of their hate of the country and what we stand for, spending tons of money on some exceptional coffee. I just sat there listening and taking the insults these innocent untaught boys were spewing out as if they alone had the knowledge all things of life.

I picked up my chair and invited myself to their table(something my wife and daughters know I would do) . These boys about the age of me landing Vietnam in 1967; most folks that have known me since 2018 see I wear hats showing 101st airborne and purple hearts from my stay in Vietnam. This instantly gave me their attention.

Boys I am going to tell you a story, back when I was your age men and women maybe your parents or grand parents decided the country going to war with another was bad thing. Their problem is that their right to peacefully to protest the war changed to hatred of the the returning soldiers which many were wounded and many combat soldiers had life-lasting scars from numerous firefights. The protestors hate of he country and the flag it represents while enjoying sacrifices soldiers’. Many of these soldiers not unlike the protestors didn’t want to go to war or even believed it was morally right, but still went.

Boys, I take it personally when at your age, your knowledge is almost empty; you have only taken having not to give one thing back to the nation that has given your parents and yourselves everything. Not all things of any country are morally pure as gold. I heard your talk of slavery as if we here in the south invented it, we didn’t ,the world has known slavery from the begining of man. The Mississippi state flag you mention is such a small part of the true slavery issue. The flags of almost every nation in the world, would need to be replaced before the flag of Mississippi. Stars & Stripes included.

My last words to them were to remember the draft was enforced when I was young, and in times of war, it would be reinstated. It then matters not your love or hate of the country or the call to duty, but being forced to fight or die ,as many of some of my favorite heroes did long ago that not unlike yourself ,had significant reservations and views against the war and the country at the time.

A call to war isn’t a soldier’s call; no soldier on the battlefield at the time of bloody firefight is thinking about the country’s glory or being awarded medals. The greatest gift each soldier gives another is a chance for one more tomorrow. Most soldiers I talked to at their moment of death were of their family and especially their mothers. Boys, we had a president once who “asked not what my country can do for me, but what I can do for the country” by the way, if our country fails, where will that leave you?

“If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.”