EDITOR’S NOTE: The following will appear in Spotlight Newspapers’ Point of View print section this week.
The writer covers the city of Saratoga Springs for Spotlight Newspapers.
Independence Day was a special holiday when I was in the Army.
In the years I spent as a gunner on an M1A1 tank, I pulled duty the majority of Christmases. I worked every Thanksgiving and every Easter. And while I was never mobilized, we were in the field regularly, for weeks or months at a time, training with little knowledge of what day of the week it was, let alone what holiday we might be missing.
The Fourth of July was different. Wherever we were, whether we were in the field or in the rear, we celebrated Independence Day.
If we were training, we’d usually coil our tanks around in a large field and the First Sergeant and Supply Sergeant would usually pull a couple of barbecues off of the supply truck for the last meal of the day. Instead of an MRE or T-rations (imagine that foil pan of baked beans you took home from last year’s family reunion; now imagine it’s filled to the gills and large enough to feed a couple dozen people) they’d throw some burgers and dogs on the grill.
Some until then unseen football would appear in some young lieutenant’s hand and privates who maybe only dreamed of making their high school football teams would start shedding their pistol belts and web gear so they could run button-hook patterns around tanks and Hummers and deuce-and-a-half-ton trucks.
If we were in the rear, celebrating the Fourth was an all-day event. Any training or maintenance we were in the middle of took a backseat to something we called the Battalion Olympics. Our company of 60 or so soldiers would face off against the other three companies in the battalion in events like `king of the ring` and tug-of-war.
We’d also have some combat-based competitions like who could load a 60-pound, high-explosive, anti-tank round the fastest, or how long it would take a group of soldiers to pull a 12-ton M113 armored personnel carrier 100 feet. (An aside: One year we found that pulling the M113 didn’t take long at all if you hid my buddies Brian Young and Steve Agag inside it and they drove the damn thing over the finish line.)
At 5 p.m., wherever we were and whatever we were doing, Fourth of July or not, we stopped for retreat. It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagpoles in the open. In the military, reveille is the signal for the start of the official duty day and is sounded when the flag is raised.
The retreat ceremony serves a twofold purpose. It signals the end of the official duty day and serves as a ceremony for paying respect to the flag. The National Anthem is played while a detail of soldiers takes down and properly folds the flag for storage until the morning. If you are on base when this happens, you stop whatever you’re doing, (this includes driving your car), face the direction of the flag and salute.
Whenever we held the `Olympics` on the Fourth of July, there would always be some newbie private or maybe some lunkheaded specialist or sergeant who’d think that just because we had it easy all day it meant you didn’t have to stop for retreat.
One year, our company commander, Cpt. Thomas `Trip` Bowen spied someone eating a hot dog while he should’ve been saluting the flag.
Surprisingly, he didn’t lose his temper. He walked over to the young man and said, `Private, the only way we can enjoy things like this,` he waved his arm toward the grills, the food and the sports equipment, `is if we remember to do things like this.` he pointed to a row of soldiers standing at attention, saluting our nation’s flag.
I put the hot dog down and tried like hell to never miss another retreat again.
It was odd, and I’m not sure who pulled duty on those days, but it never seemed like me or anyone I knew had KP, firewatch or any other detail on the Fourth. And looking back on it, I realize those days for what they were: family barbecues.
This July I will see Young, Agag, and a few others from our platoon who we’ve managed to round up recently. No doubt we’ll eat too much, drink too much (if our wives allow us) and enjoy any fireworks that may be left over from Independence Day.
I hope you do the same on the Fourth, but I encourage you to take some time to remember the individuals who make our independence and our freedom possible. Admire the flag for moment, thank a veteran, then go watch the fireworks.
“