I don’t remember if it was close to Veterans Day, but it was cool and the leaves lined the streets in West Point, Georgia, waiting for the street sweepers to come along and sweep them up.  As was usual for this 9 year old boy back in 1967, I departed the house for a 15 minute trip down the street to visit one of my friends.

As I got close to his house, I saw the line of cars parked along the street, among them an Army staff car and folks going in and out of the house.

I walked on over to my friend’s house, but he wasn’t there, and turned around and walked home, slowly observing the scene as I walked back by the house that was the center of all the activity.  I wondered why some of the people coming out looked like they had been crying, so when I got home I asked my mom. 

Mom didn’t know, but the next day I found out that one of the young men that grew up in West Point had been killed in the Vietnam War.  I didn’t cry about it, but to this day whenever the leaves fall from the trees and collect in the streets, I think about him.  Though I didn’t know him, I think about his mother and his father, his sisters and brothers, his grandmothers and grandfathers and the effect of his death on them.  I think about the children that didn’t get a chance to be born of this hero, and the happy times that never happened.

I don’t know who you are and how you died, but you made a lifelong impression upon me.  I am thankful for what you did for me, so that I didn’t have to do it.

I do know this.  You are in Heaven now with Jesus, for Matthew 5:9 says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”