On Tuesday, our country will celebrate Independence Day, paying tribute to our hard-earned freedom made possible by men and women in uniform. It’s easy to talk about freedom when you live in an area that’s not threatened by war, where children can mostly play in their yards without fear, and where the people you love never go to bed hungry or wonder where they can find medical care. But outside of that well-protected bubble of personal security, it only takes a brief look at international news to see how others around the world are caught up in wars, in survival, trying to make a way to a better, more peaceful life.

Recently, I’ve been reading Jane Smiley’s novel, Some Luck that’s an excellent story of the life of the Langdon family of Denby, Iowa from 1920 through the early 1950s. I chose this book because it opens in the year my father was born and the setting is a farm. Historical fiction, far more than any history teacher I ever had, has caught my fascination with life in the past and how it impacts the present.

When the book opens, Walter–the father is twenty-five and back on the farm after his stint in WWI. He’s married to Rosanna, a German-American who grew up on a neighboring farm.

Early in the novel, their first child, Frank is born and is quite a handsome boy, intelligent, and very strong-willed. As his life unfolds, Frank becomes more of all those characteristics and wants to escape the farm. The next child, Joe is opposite of Frank and doesn’t have the “hearty” construction of his brother or the academic ability. What he does have is interest and skill with their farm animals and growing crops; he is made for the farming life.

When WWII is just ramping up, Frank enlists in the Army and eventually is trained to be a sniper based in Northern Africa. His personality and his skills in hunting and reading the land–finding the habitats of the animals with high-yield furs, serve him well in leading those missions. Meanwhile, back home in Iowa, his family, which over the years added three more children, is receiving sparse news from their radio and from infrequent letters from Frank. Each person deals with the news of the war, the concern about Frank in different ways.

Frank’s father is proud of his son for being “man enough to be chosen to be a sniper.” What he doesn’t know is that Frank, when he’s leading his group wonders about the competence of his superior officers issuing the commands. Several times Frank says, “Are the generals even looking at a map?” Lying under the cover of darkness, he wonders if they just rely on a compass to give their direction to move forward without knowing the villages and location of the enemy where they’re sending the snipers.

Rosanna vacillates between worry for her son, and an underlying feeling that he’s strong enough to get out of any situation– as he had since he was a child. Joe doesn’t go into the service because he gets a special agricultural dispensation. He’s busy trying new methods of farming and earns higher than ever crop yields. With his earnings he’s able to buy a car and “profits from the war” as some in his community refer to the prices he received for the grain.

Frank’s younger sister, Lillian is in middle school. She hears the adults talking about the war, sees the four-sentence letters from her brother, and feels guilty that she isn’t more concerned that the “war over there” will invade the United States; what she’s worried about is how the girls are treating her at school. Lillian’s one friend is no longer in her class and the other females are mean. She’s unable to deal with any notion of war because she’s in her own hell at school.

Like in every age, the Langdon family members viewed the war from different perspectives, based on their ages, experience, and on how it impacted their daily lives. I can identify with Lillian, not because I was mistreated by any girls at Jonesboro Middle School, but because I was that age when my boy cousins were in branches of the service during the Vietnam War. I saw images–more than were available in WWII, but less numbers and less immediate than wars of today, on the nightly news. I would listen to the adults speak of letters from my cousins. I didn’t have a brother in the war, and as a female, I wouldn’t be included in the draft if the war lasted a long time.

I guess the reason this post has gone on about the book I’m reading, is when we get to holidays that honor those who’ve served in the military, I have no life experience to speak from. Maybe part of the freedom that I have is to be able to look at what I could do to contribute. When I was in middle school, our Girl Scout troop sent tins of homemade cookies to the troops fighting in Vietnam. I remember we were all thrilled when those soldiers sent us “Thank You” letters. At Veteran’s Day a couple of years ago, I started supporting Veterinarians to Veterans– a program that rescues shelter dogs and trains them to be service dogs for veterans.

https://www.vetstovetsunited.org/about-us

For those of us who can move about freely, without the fear that so many experience–in our country and around the world, may we look for ways to support those who are fighting for freedom.

Happy 4th of July to you all,

Connie