I first heard this song a few weeks ago when I helped staff a Vets Journey Home retreat. One of the processes we were given time to do was to write a letter to a POW/MIA.
I sat there in the still and quiet of that room among those participants and staff (that included many veterans,) and for the first time I can remember, I focused my energy on those soldiers. It was the first time I ever really thought about them, their young lives, their sacrifices, hopes and dreams~ and oh, oh my God . . . their fears. And the families they left behind~ and how old those families are today.
I joined the others who had begun writing. And I wrote . . . and wrote, never realizing until that day two weeks ago, how much was inside me that I had to say to those soldiers. Those POW/MIA’s.
I never knew . . . I never knew until that day.
Forty years inside me.
And Gene, the VJH leader, joined a few others on that rainy Monday morning in a pilgrimage to The Wall. There, he placed the envelope of letters, my letter, my husband’s letter.
A few days later when VJH sent us a photograph of Gene with our envelope standing before The Wall ~ the sense of release shocked me.
