Many Are Called

      When Tom makes a mistake on the job, he likes to say that he did too many drugs up at Middlebury College. I've been working for him part-time as a contractor, redoing the the siding on his house. Every now and again he'll miscut a piece of wood or drop his paintbrush off a ladder, leading him to proclaim his affiliation with the 60s drug movement. "That was a time when I was still taking wars for granted," he says.
       I keep on swinging my paintbrush, my mouth shut, trying to figure out where this conversation is going, not quite relishing talking politics with the man who hands me a paycheck. "Our generation, we had no respect for our parents and what they were doing in World War 2."
     
    World War 2? Now those were simpler times. They weren't better times. But they were simpler, from the standpoint of good and evil. The last great war. Every year, the veterans, the ones who are still alive, gather in France and go to Normandy Beach and look at the graves of their fallen friends. If that doesn't move you then you have a heart of stone. See, I watch the history channel late at night. And I don't know how the fuck they do it, but they restored all this old footage of the war into color and HD, so it's like you're sitting there in you're living room... Like basically you're in the war. And you watch these men die over and over again.
     The history you read in class can be rewritten and distorted. But images don't lie. What you see, right there in front of your face, in such high definition, is reality. As I've grown older and learned more about this shit, I've come to respect my parents' generation a little more. Watching this old film, I see truth right there on the screen. In the 60s we were brats doing drugs. Let me give you another example.

     Tom's mother drove down from Vermont and picked him up in Jersey. It was one of those autumn days where all daylight is golden. An autumn day that in Tom's memory is always late afternoon, amber rays poking through brown and yellow leaves. You can tell it's an important memory to him, because of the lighting. His mother picks him up in Jersey and they drive down to DC, and arrive at Arlington National Cemetery where they are going to bury his uncle.
    The uncle was a World War 2 vet, Tom didn't know him well, but he wanted to be at the funeral anyway for his mother.  What he saw there was four uniformed men, walking in front of a black horse-drawn carriage, marching in perfect silence and in perfect unison, approaching the grave site, burying the black coffin with an American flag. Perfect silence and perfect unison, the whole time, moving with precision and clarity. Then, coming up over the hill, a brass band playing a dirge.
     One of the uncle's old comrades speaks to the crowd gathered. "We want to welcome this man home."

     Tom repeats that to me. "We want to welcome him home. If that doesn't move you then you have a heart of stone." I'm up on the ladder now, painting another section of the house. "That moment stays with me, because it's precisely when I came to respect what these servicemen do for this country. Arlington Cemetery was an overwhelming sight. It was power."