UNKNOWN SOLDIER
By Deirdre Reilly
Although it is summertime now, one way to keep Christmas in your heart all year long is to remember the lessons of Christmas throughout the year. This brings me to recall something very special that happened to two men and three children, and bears repeating.
Very early in the morning last December, my husband and my eight year old son happened across a United States Army soldier on an exit ramp near the town where we live. It was a very cold Sunday morning, when frost lay on the ground and tree limbs were stark and twisted against a thick gray sky. Not too many other cars were out, and those who were out were hurrying to get somewhere, exhaust coming from each car in warm-looking puffs as they glided down the highway, frost still on the windshields. My husband and son were coming home from my son's 6 AM hockey game, and looking forward to getting breakfast out together and then returning home, where the rest of us lay dreaming. As my husband approached the end of the ramp the soldier got out of his car, a grey Maxima that had broken down. The soldier was in full dress uniform, and was cold, and very young; early twenties, my husband guessed. My husband pulled over to see what he could do to help. The soldier needed a cell phone, he said he was going to call his girlfriend to see if she could come and get him and his two daughters his daughters were bundled into the cold car and bring them back home to Derry, NH, where they lived. My husband looked into the car and saw the soldier's four year old, dressed in her best party dress, and a baby, zipped up to her chin into her thick snuggly. The three of them had been on their way to a Christmas party at the Boston barracks when the car had chosen that time to die. At this point, the soldier was just trying to get home; the party had been given up on. The little girl grinned at my husband from the back seat, and I know he must have grinned back at her, too. My husband moved the little girls into our car, where the four year old proceeded to become very interested in my eight year old "she was patting me," he reported in a resigned way to me later, upon the re-telling of their memorable morning and the men talked about the young soldier's options.
My husband told me that this young man was, to him, a soldier first someone who already, with his young life, done much for us just by his service but he was also a young man who still didn't have all the answers. We have a son of our own who is just a few years younger than this soldier who was sitting beside him. The soldier didn't have Triple A, and he had no one to call for help. As the baby stared, round-eyed, at them all, my husband offered his Triple A for a tow, and then offered to take the soldier and the children into Boston for the party. The soldier had decided to just try to get back home, and so they called for the tow and my husband offered to drive the three of them back to New Hampshire. They chatted as they waited; my husband commented that the Christmas party sure was early, if they had been on the road at six in the morning, and the soldier commented that "the army does everything early."
They all sat together, my family and his, and then headed up north after the tow truck came, the soldier's broken-down car following behind them. There is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, guarded twenty-four hours a day with honor in Washington, D.C., but there is also the living Unknown Soldier, among us every day. Crippled by war, perhaps, or mentally ravaged by what he has seen in a country far away, or maybe just young, and needing a hand with the stuff of everyday life they are here, with us right now. We are sometimes stymied by the American soldier how do you begin to thank people who pick up a gun and say good-bye to everyone who matters and fly far away because they believe in protecting the country we all live in?
Sometimes, you give them a cell phone and your Triple A, and make sure their children are warm. My husband watched the uniformed soldier and his dressed-up little girls climb the steps of their big old three-family house, where toys dotted the yard and the frost was beginning to thaw and show the green underneath. My husband was reluctant to talk about this to me, downplaying the aid he had offered. But eight year olds sing like canaries. I think my husband feels that at the end of the day, it was just one dad helping another dad get his children home. And one man helping another, too, trying, through his actions to say thank you very much, Unknown Soldier, for all you have given up and gone through and laid down for all of us, even though to you, we are Unknown Americans.
