Soldiers homecoming

One of the things I like best about my job as a journalist is the fact that I get to go places and meet people that I would ordinarily never get to if I had another career. I was thinking about this on Tuesday when I went to cover the homecoming of 40-something soldiers who were coming home to Aliceville, Ala. after more than a year in Iraq. I was leaning up against a brick wall trying to hide in what small amount of shade there was, drenched in sweat in the 98 degree heat. I was dehydrated and hungry and starting to feel faint... but then the bus pulled up. Kids, mothers, wives and other family members went up to the bus shrieking and clapping and crying for their soldiers. I had never seen anything like it, and it was at that moment that I forgot about how rediculously hot it was or the fact that I hadn't eaten anything since the day before. All I could do was stand in awe at the shear emotion I was observing. Not every man came back. One man from the unit died a few months before. The men that I witnessed coming off that bus could have had the same thing happen to them, only it didn't. They were lucky. I was strongly against the war in Iraq when this thing started a couple years ago, and still wish that things would have been different. But, they weren't, and they aren't. I did learn something, however, at the Aliceville armory. Its that there are people in this world who are a lot braver and a lot more selfless than I am, and it is because of their willingness to do whatever their country tells them to do- regardless of whether I believe it is right or not- that I have the freedom to do my job and write.