Celebrate this Independence Day with both gusto and solemnity.
It’s an Independence day of great celebration in this country but without many of the attendant family obligations that characterize other holidays.
It’s summertime, school’s out, families and individuals are on vacation, and roughly one-quarter of our military population.
Are moving on to their next duty stations, be it to Japan, Italy, Texas, Hawaii or North Dakota, which was my first duty station.
Independence Day was always a special day in our family:
Not only because my parents loved this country, but also because my father’s birthday was July 3.
We considered his birthday a movable feast in our house, usually co-celebrating it on July 4.
The candles and cake-cutting were done after the town parade and cookout, but before the evening sparklers and fireworks display.
When my dad was a kid, his birthday must have seemed to him like the “Trooping of the Color in England.
Which includes much pomp and circumstance to mark the monarch’s birthday.
I remember the great Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. That summer I was 10 years old.
I couldn’t quite figure out why that Fourth of July was any more special than the one the year before. When you’re 10 years old, 200 years is indistinguishable from two weeks. Both are “a really long time ago.”
As we approach our nation’s Semi quin centennial in 2026:
To me, weeks and even years now have a way of flying by too fast. Strange how that happens.
The Fourth of July has another significant meaning to me, for it was on that day back in 2000.
Since joining the Air Force I have had four combat deployments to the Middle East and one full year of “armistice” on the Korean peninsula.
Of my four Middle East deployments three of them started in the fall and ended in the spring of the following year.
While I missed being around my family or friends at those times, I certainly felt like I was at the right place and at the right time for my fellow servicemembers.
Who were likewise away from their families many for the first time, and many who had spouses and young children missing them at home.
