We Didn’t Lose
My youngest son is 24, my oldest son is 38 and they are just beginning to know some of the things that I decided to talk to you about. From pictures and this and that. And they’re like, ‘wow! Dad! Damn!’ I had to help unload body bags on Thanksgiving morning off a helicopter. What do you think I think about? Those are the things that, they don’t leave you. My mother and I corresponded quite a bit. I actually congratulate my mom and I told her, ‘You know if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have made it through. You gave me a strong will, you gave me a strong mind, you gave me a strong basic education, and those are the things that got me through all this.’ When my mother passed away about two years ago, she left me all the letters that I’d written her. She had saved them. She had saved them chronologically. And so as I was emptying out her duplex, she had told me that they were there, and I never wanted to bother with it. I sat down and I started reading them.
We got beat up sometimes, but we didn’t lose. That’s what people don’t understand. People did not, we did not walk away as, ‘Hey they kicked us out of here, like they did the French.’ We knew we were playing with death and we cheated death so much and that’s how I look at my life. No matter how many troubles or whatever goes on in my life, I always reflect, when times get hard, I always reflect to those times and say hey look, it’s not that bad.