They stood beside their cars that were parked at the side of the road.
Some saluted. Some held their hands over their hearts. Some just bowed their heads.
When the hearse carrying my father’s body traveled the roads between his home in Kokomo and his final resting place in the Marion National Cemetery, everyone we passed paid respect. The flag attached to the hearse indicated that a veteran of the U.S. armed services was taking his final ride.
The people who pulled over and doffed their caps were the sort of folks Dad would have liked — farmers, laborers, Americans who still worked to make it.
Not those who had it made.
That’s what Dad had been all his life.
The son of a father who was a day laborer and a troubled mother, he learned early to distrust the vagaries of an uncertain world and prominent, powerful people. Dad spent several years in an orphanage as a child, an experience that cured him of any notion that fate was benevolent or that anyone would catch him if he ever fell.
He joined the Army as soon as he graduated from high school in the waning days of World War II. He remained devoted to the Army for the rest of his life.
It wasn’t that he set aside his by then ingrained skepticism. He could laugh at the Army’s foibles.
For example, he learned to drive in the Army, teaching himself while trying to maneuver a truck the size of a small building around a base in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.
Only in the Army, Dad used to joke, would someone who’d never been behind the wheel of a car in his life be handed the keys to a behemoth like that.
But he was grateful to the Army.
While he was in the service and able to count on getting three square meals for perhaps the first time in his life, he grew 3 inches, entering at a spindly 5-foot-10 and departing a muscular 6-foot-1. When he got out of the service, he became the first member of his birth family to graduate college — courtesy of the G.I. Bill. Late in life, his veteran’s benefits provided him with essential health care and other necessary support.
Dad realized that, in exchange for those two years he spent in uniform, the Army had taken care of him for much of his life.
He appreciated that.
He respected that.
In his final years, when his sight failed him, the VA sent him to a rehabilitation facility for veterans who were blind or going blind. He was there for six weeks.
When I went to visit him, we had lunch with the other vets who were there. Even though the guys at the table had served at different times in different places and, in some cases, different wars, their bond was unmistakable. They spent the whole meal swapping stories, jokes and laughs.
Afterward, when I asked Dad about that sense of rapport, he shrugged.
Everyone at the table, he said, had surrendered some portion of his life — and perhaps even more — to the service. They could connect with and respect one another on that basis.
My father is buried in a graveyard filled with the earthly remains of hundreds of other veterans.
When I go up to place flowers on his grave, occasionally I encounter someone else who is grieving a lost loved one who happened to be a vet.
On those occasions, we don’t speak to each other. We just nod and bow our heads.
Former President Donald Trump visited a national cemetery recently — the most honored one, Arlington. He brought a camera crew to film a campaign commercial, even though Arlington’s rules prohibit that.
Dad leaned Republican most of his life.
He didn’t care for Trump, though — for the same reason he couldn’t support John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush. Dad’s objection wasn’t ideological. My father didn’t think anyone who had known nothing but privilege in life could appreciate the hard choices ordinary people have to make.
Trump posed for a photo with a smile on his face while he gave the thumbs-up sign beside the grave of a fallen soldier.
I wonder what possibly could have led my father to believe Donald Trump couldn’t understand or respect the struggles and sacrifices of common folk.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
