Love of Co u n t r y by Lyle Dagnen Dad sat me on the kitchen table so that I could face him. He had decided that it was time that I learned the “Pledge to the Flag” as he called it. Dad had some very serious ideas about things he thought his children should know and understand. He was the kind of man that a child wanted to please so that when he began to teach us anything we were very apt pupils. At the tender age of eighteen, Dad volunteered to join the United States Army. Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States needed soldiers. The deal was if the high school would agree that the senior boys had completed enough of their school work they could graduate early and join the armed forces. Dad and his buddies joined. The years that most young men his age would have been in college, he was in Europe doing the job that was thought necessary at the time. He felt very strongly about loyalty to the country and the flag that is the symbol of our country. So, before I began school I learned to pledge to the flag. Words I did not fully understand at the time. In my child's mind I wasn't even sure where town was, let alone what a country was, but I still knew the pledge and could say it. As I grew, my teachers taught me about the pledge. I learned about what made our country great in my history classes. I began to understand what the pledge meant when I said it. Dad never shared many war stories with me because I was a girl and girls needed to be protected. I did, however, sneak around and listen when he did not know I could hear the stories he shared with my brother or when he spoke with my uncles. As I grew to adulthood and began to innate conversations with him, he shared pieces of stories with me. He spoke of how between battles he and the men in his group would play baseball with the gloves and bats they always carried with them. He spoke of a young German girl he was friends with while stationed there after the war. He spoke of a young man who relieved him on guard duty one night and was then shot and killed. He spoke of
being still while a column of German tanks rolled by on the road below him. He spoke of liberating a death camp and the ovens still being warm and the starving people glad to see the Americans walk through the gate. Dad is buried in the National Cemetery in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is there with the men with whom he spent four years. It is fitting that he is there with his band of brothers. He had a deep and abiding love for the country that he risked so much for in his youth. He passed that love of country to me. I sit now recalling the words to the “Pledge to the Flag”. He always reminded me that his coffin did not have to be expensive because it would be draped with the flag. We have that flag, presented to the family in gratitude for his service. National Cemetery Here they are, row on row, Silent now, they say not a word, A granite stone, a simple name, Their deeds are songs seldom heard. If you stand in the quiet on a misty morn, Close your eyes and stand really still, You'll hear the stories of courage born, Together they lie, under the grass so green. Your heart will tell you their stories true, Of a life that they gave for me and for you, A stone marks the place, a final truth, Where they gained their rest, a last tribute.
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