“Yesterday…”
Dateline: Old School
“The only thing you take with you when you’re gone is what you leave behind.”
~ John Allston
The time to think about your legacy, is before you begin it.
The pens of history contain no erasers.
When future generations look back on us and shine a light into our shadows, how proud will you be on what they find?
I need not be specific because basically I think ALL the wheels have come off.
To set the stage, know this of me:
I trust not one word of governments, be they ancient or of today.
I trust not one word of Kings and Queens, born in or elected to.
I trust you who wear blue collars and blue jeans.
I trust you who roll up your white sleeves and loosen your tie.
I trust you who stand between me and sickness and me and the bad guys.
I trust those who educate not those who indoctrinate.
In us, I trust.
“…all my troubles…”
This here is a personal essay with some journalism thrown in, mainly the stuff with quotes around it.
Last week during the Friday weigh-in at the Elite No. 5 Toledo Bend shindig I heard a grown man up on the Bassmaster stage break down, heard the man’s voice crack, not because of fish lost, not because of a cut not made, but because of a son, in harm’s way.
Davy Hite: “Someone training with my son was killed last week during a live fire exercise.”
And then, what every parent of a son or daughter in the military thinks but rarely says, “The country seems to be numb to the fact that every day our children in the military are being killed and…”
The rest was left hanging, a sentence, a question too profound, too disheartening, too scary to answer.
Never let your heart ask why.
Thou shalt, was not chiseled in invisible ink.
“db, my son will be deployed to Afghanistan in December. Have we learned nothing…nothing?”
No, Davy Hite, no we have not.
“…seemed so far away…”
Davy, myself and his 19-year-old son, Peyton, are sitting in a fancy resort restaurant far away from the weigh-in stage, far away from Afghanistan, far away from live fire.
But it is because of those in that line of harm, that we sit where we do.
We also though sit in the state of Louisiana where if those who want to harm us came through those resort doors, we could harm them back.
I am FOR gun CONTROL especially those laws like here in Louisiana that will help me CONTROL the bad guys. I’ve checked, the word “surrender” never appears in the Constitution of the United States nor the Declaration of Independence.
I take that as a message.
Davy Hite joined the military, full-time in the National Guard, at age 17, spent 10 years, “…wearing combat boots full-time, kept the M-1 tanks rolling mechanically.”
For reasons none of our business Davy was raised by his grandparents, hardworking folk, World War II folk fighting in Europe and supporting the troops back home in America.
The Greatest Generation.
“They instilled in me hard work, education, old school values…”
And once again, the sentence was left danglin’.
“…now it looks as though…”
“Davy, tell me about Parker.”
It is for Parker that Davy’s voice cracked.
Lt. Parker Hite.
West Point Graduate, Lt. Parker Hite.
Army Ranger Lt. Parker Hite.
“He will be in harm’s way…”
Yes he will, “…he’s with the 101st, Airborne.”
The Screaming Eagles.
First in, last out.
Make no mistake folks, we are at war. The government may call it what they want, they may dance around it with fancy nonsensical words, but the enemy is shooting at us.
That folks, is war.
“Parker was in school, Newberry College in South Carolina, was the quarterback of the football team, was there two years when he came up to me and told me, ‘Dad I want to go to the Military Academy,’ I was just floored and wowed.”
Davy immediately started reaching out, it was South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan who wrote the recommendation letter, the rest was up to Parker. “He did a bunch of interviews, essays, it was eye-opening to see just how seriously everyone took it,” said Davy. “And I mean they should, some of the people who have made this world and this country went there and graduated from West Point.”
Around 4,500 applied to the Academy that year, they cut down to 2,500, eventually 1,250 made it.
Parker Hite was one of them and he had to start all over again. There are no two- year transfers at West Point. Four years later, in May of 2015, Parker graduated 43rd in his class, the top 4 percent of his class.
Sitting next to me at the table is his little, sort of, brother, 19-year-old Peyton Hite.
Class valedictorian.
“…they’re here to stay…”
Peyton is 6 foot, 3 inches tall, in high school football played, linebacker, half back and on special teams. “I never came off the field, lots of pickle juice on the sidelines. I was the Swiss Army Knife of the team.”
Davy: “He was a rented mule.”
Mule or not his high school GPA was 5.1 out of…4.0. “I took honors courses, AP courses and college courses…it sort of counted more.”
Both Parker and Peyton got full scholarships to college, “…mostly academic, 2/3 academic, 1/3 athletic.”
I’m looking at Davy, he reads my mind, “Their mom had a lot to do with it, I was a B and C student in high school (I wrote down C & D and he immediately corrected it) but Natalie (his wife, their mom) and I stressed from the get go ACADEMICS MATTER, once you have an education no one can take that away from you, first thing they both did coming home from school was their homework, no excuses.”
Peyton red-shirted his first year at Newberry College, now a sophomore with a double major in History and English, “I want to be a high school principal when all is said and done.”
I look to my left at Davy, he is dabbing his eyes.
“I would like to be hands-on with the kids in my school, a leader, a role model, a father figure to those who lack it.”
I look back and just smile at Davy.
Nice job man, props to you and Natalie.
“…oh, I believe…”
I’m not positive Peyton knows what “Old School” means but you tell me, this is his answer when I asked him what he learned from his dad, Davy, the guy next to me wiping his eyes.
“I learned to take pride in everything I do, to work hard, to get an education, to help people and to always put the best effort forward.”
I’m thinking, yes, on Old School.
In 1998, Tom Brokaw wrote a book called The Greatest Generation, which from what I can figure out was the generation defined from the years 1901-1945.
Fifty-three years from now when an author writes of us, what will be our name?
The wheels are coming off, yet we still can produce young men and women like Parker and Peyton Hite.
Davy Hite’s two sons.
They, and those like them, will be the ones who write about us.
Will they look kindly on us?
To those who will one day hold the pens with no erasers I ask of you this:
Give us credit for getting it right with some of you, some of our parents got it right with some of us.
Speak bad of us, and all the generations before us, who sent the young off to fight the battles of the old. Do not pass that tradition on to your children, they, and you, didn’t deserve that.
Men like Davy Hite got it right.
The father of Martin Luther King got it right.
Those who stood up to the King in 1776, got it right.
It is within us, to get it right.
We have in our hearts the ability to put the wheels back on.
I just don’t know if we have the balls…
“…in yesterday.”
Yesterday
The Beatles
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“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”
~George Bernard Shaw