One of the participants in the Fourth of July parade in my medium-sized New Jersey town was a 90 year old man who was a veteran of the South Pacific theater in WWII.  The convertible in which he was riding listed his medals: a Purple Heart, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, service awards….He was an old man, in his American legion cap, white haired and waving.  He was small and stooped.  If I’d passed him in the park, I would have assumed he was just another one of the little old men who take their very slow walks in the shade of the early morning or the early evening.  I would not have known that he was a brave man.

I was glad that he got to ride in the parade.  Glad that I got to sit on the curb in the shade of my friend’s big old house and cheer for the WWII vet.  I stood up when he went by, and cheered, and yelled and whooped for him.

He reminded me of my father, of course, who was also a WWII vet but did not live to be 90 or ride in any parades.  Like so many of his fellow vets, my father came home after the horrors of war and didn’t talk about what it felt like to be the bombardier in a B-24 in Italy in the last few years of the war.  He did talk about what it meant to be brave, though.  He said that being brave wasn’t like it was in the movies, and that courage wasn’t about being the biggest or the the strongest or the loudest but about being the one who did what he was sent out to do and who came home alive.  He said that being brave was about living through what you lived through, and that courage was about going home and living your life.

Which is what he did, along with many of his peers.  They came home and planted gardens, taught us how to play poker, and showed us what a family was for.  Like the veteran in the convertible in our parade, they were brave when it mattered and aged into the little old men in the park in the early evening.

It made me realize that we look into the faces of the brave every day, and we probably never realize that we do.   My friend in the big old house decided to hold her traditional Fourth of July party, even though her husband, who was the prime mover behind the annual bash, had died the month before.  She and her children decided that it would be sadder for them to watch the parade alone, or to spend the day in some other place, feeling wrong about where they were.  And when the old soldier went by and I stood up and cheered, I realized that the faces of the brave were standing right next to me.