“Coming Home” this past month involved revisiting Langley Middle School with seven other veterans and the wife of a deceased veteran. We were there to share with the students some perspectives on Veterans Day. It was a “coming home” of sorts for me in that this is one of the schools in the town where I live and in the school district where I finished my career as school superintendent.
LMS is a recognizable school structure with a lifetime legacy of memories for many on South Whidbey. At one time this was Langley High School and the graduating class photographs from the early 1900s up through the 1960s still hang in the hallways. There is a warmth in both the structure and the people who work there that transcends time and space and encompasses the visitor in nostalgic thoughts of another era in education.
We were welcomed by the assistant principal and the school counselor and escorted to an inviting room with cups of coffee all around. We were an unlikely gathering of eagles: Two World War II veterans, a veteran of Bosnia and the Gulf War, five from the Vietnam era and the spouse of a deceased Vietnam era veteran. We would be talking to social studies classes in two groups and in three different sessions for about 50 minutes each.
We had a script for the introduction that involved some background on Veterans Day, the branches of the military and the wars our country has fought since World War I. Then each of us had five minutes to tell a little bit about ourselves, what our military experience was like and what we got from the experience.
The questions we got from students were very interesting and a show of hands indicated that almost half of the students currently had a relative in the military. One boy asked whether we ever felt homesick when we were in the military, to which our senior member, a former machine gunner in Patton’s Army, who liberated Buchenwald, responded: “Of course I missed my mom and dad, my brothers and sisters, and my uncles and aunts and all of the things about home.”
In our group, three of us made the point that we had not been very good students before we went in the military but that after our military service we were very successful academically when we went back to school.
One of our veterans, a graduate of West Point and a career military officer, said “boys and girls, you live in the best country in the world. How lucky you are to go to school. I remember the children in Bosnia waving and smiling when we restored order in the country and they could return to see their friends at school each day.”
He brought along a small red flag with six blue stars on it that hangs in the window of his home. “Each star represents a family member who served in combat. These stars are for my children and their spouses and two are girls who served.” The girls in the bleachers looked a little more intently at the speaker.
Each session ended with our asking the students to stand with us and say the Pledge of Allegiance, along with a suggestion that the next time they have the opportunity to say the pledge at a game or community event, they remember each of us and our stories of military service.
Afterwards, the principal came by to express his personal appreciation for our presence and for adding a special meaning to Veterans Day this year. We all walked a little taller and smiled a little wider as we left the school.
One of our group summed up the experience in his answer to the question ‘What is your hope for our country?’
“You are my hope for our country,” he told the middle schoolers, “and “I think the country will be in good hands.”
