Sobering Reality

I've been in San Antonio this past week - eight days away from home.  The first half of the trip was wonderful. Brent came with me and we had a little vacation time together.  But he came home Monday and I stayed to work a conference for the AUR - Association of University Radiologists - annual meeting, and that half was mostly just work.  I was homesick and so grateful to come to the end of the conference. 

I finally returned home yesterday.  On the first leg of the trip, the flight from San Antonio to Las Vegas, a lot of the people were continuing on to San Diego, including the woman and her son I was sitting next to.  It turned out the boy, and he seemed so young to me, not quite 20 yet, was a Marine and had been in Afghanistan.  Where he lost his lower leg and foot in a land mine a few months ago.  He still didn't have his prosthesis because he keeps hitting little bumps in the road, including yet again another surgery last week to clear a cyst that had developed on the stump.

He was returning to San Diego to be there when his unit returned from Afghanistan this weekend.  He left from the hospital to go there and will return to the hospital after the weekend is over.

I found out that children who do adult things get treated like adults.  I was touched by the way other soldiers on the flight, total strangers to him, bought him a drink and delivered it to him with the most profound respect and reverence.  I saw the tears that came to his eyes as his comrades paid tribute to the sacrifice he made.  He was genuinely touched by their tribute to him. 

We don't hear a lot about the war going on in Afghanistan right now.  We rarely hear much about Iraq anymore.  It's just something we're sending our kids overseas to take care of.  Something going on quietly here in the States because we are so far removed from it.  Unless we have someone over there we care about.

But there is still a big war against terrorism raging.  We can't forget it.  We can't let kids like Matt Miller (if I remember his name correctly) do what they do without remembering.  Freedom requires sacrifice.  It should require sacrifice from every one of us.  Fortunately we aren't all required to give our limbs or our lives, but we all should be sacrificing our best efforts to preserve our freedoms in everything we do, in the laws we support, in the men and women we elect to govern us and make laws for us, and in every effort we make to help preserve the freedoms we've been granted.   That's the sobering cost that comes with having the freedoms we have, and unless we're willing to pay it, we stand in jeopardy of losing more and more of those freedoms, one law and one step at a time.