A Walker in the Suburbs

I don’t know exactly what I was doing when “Band of Brothers” first aired in 2001. Raising children, I guess. But I’ve been watching it now, courtesy of Netflix, for several weeks, and the day after I view each episode I can’t get the music or the images out of my mind. The score is elegaic but forward-moving, perfectly suited to its subject, and it breaks my heart, as does the show.

I have seen war movies, plenty of them. But there’s an unrelenting power to these episodes that brings home over and over again what we owe to these men. What they did for us and for our country. The scenes are gray, colorless: the cold, the mud, the fear, the constant presence of death. And the soldiers, they are so very, very young.

I watched the final episode last night, and it was a comfort to learn the outcome of those E Company survivors, to know that they returned home to be mail carriers and earth movers. To live ordinary lives.

Today will be harder on many of us than the last few September 11ths, I think. Harder because of the controversies, harder because of the anger, and harder because today, at least where I live, is uncannily like that day: impossibly blue skies, a hint of fall, a day at first like many others.

In the last couple of years, three of our neighbors have erected flagpoles. There’s one next door, another across the street and still another at the corner.

I just walked past that one this morning. Will and Erica, our friends who live there, have each served more than one tour of duty in Iraq. Will received the Purple Heart. Their flag is the biggest of them all. It’s flying at half mast today.

Independence Day in the Heartland. Small flags flying. People unabashedly wear red, white and blue. A Methodist church and a sermon on national humility. All this has me thinking: How does a nation, founded in an age of belief, survive in an age of secularism? The Europeans have figured it out, but here in our earnest land, it isn’t as easy. We find it harder to say one thing and do another. Our nation is still young. At least we hope it is.