Day 30 - Memorial Day Tribute

As this is Memorial Day Weekend, I decided it was time I sat down and read all the letters my uncle Melville Hines sent home during his time in the Marines.  So I began yesterday afternoon reading the 106 letters he wrote from the time he left to go to boot camp until the last letter my grandparents got before he was killed in Guam.  My brother had the letters and other memorabilia at his house for a long time, and brought them to me quite a while back but I never had taken the time to sit and read them--until yesterday.  How I wish I had read them when I was much younger so that I would have had a better understanding of who this young man was.  The letters opened up a picture of him for me so that I could see the farm boy he was as he went to San Diego and saw things and people he would never have seen in Hamlin, Texas.  He talks about swimming in the ocean, seeing fish as big as cows (porpoises), seeing Red Skelton live, the Stamps Quartet at church one Sunday (and he was a faithful churchgoer both stateside and in the Pacific).  He talked a lot about the food they were fed--and he thought it was good but just not enough biscuits and fried chicken and ham!  He played like a kid when he got time off--riding ferris wheels, playing baseball and football, swimming in the ocean and lying on the beach in the Pacific eating coconuts and bananas.  He loved his family and missed them terribly and worried about how they were doing.  He craved letters from home.  He ran into people from Hamlin quite a lot to have been in San Diego--I guess many families were drawn to that area for work and to be near their sons who were drafted or enlisted.  He wrote his baby sister and sent her gifts and money and told her he wished she could see the things he was seeing.  He was a young man with his life in front of him until he stepped onto the shores of Guam and was hit in the lower back with shrapnel.  I have wept tears this weekend for the great loss my grandparents and mother had to bear in his death.  Because now I know him a little--his personality, his teasing, his faith, his sacrifice, his homesickness and his joy in seeing new things.  The box with his letters in it is hallowed ground to me now--it is what is left of an uncle who would have spoiled me and loved me and played with me and given me cousins except for his sacrifice for his country and all it stood and stands for.

And this story is played out by families all over the United States today as they remember the sacrifices their families have made for us to live in this great country.  The losses continue even today as the few die for the many for freedom's sake.  My nephew who is in the Army right now and is in my prayers always is doing this great thing for all of us, and my granddaughter who turns 15 today is telling me she is considering the Air Force Academy--so the torch will continue through our family and we will be proud of it.