Few family events are so Americana as watching community sponsored fireworks shows the night of July 4th. All enjoy the vividly colored explosions of the sky, the distant booms, lingering foggy smoke, and often the accompanying theme music played, in our case, on a local FM radio station. A lively capstone on our earlier dinner time family discussion of what July 4th meant historically. Of course our more exacting members had to remind us that the document was actually signed on July 2nd. But we read it out loud anyway. Two of our three grandchildren are too young to understand the gravity of the ideas carried in the Declaration of Independence; one at age 13 is beginning to understand that all we take for granted for the past two plus centuries was once nebulous. But we must also understand that the freedoms demanded in that Declaration and encoded in the later Constitution may be becoming fantasies, no more representing the realities of our nation’s unique history and status than do the fireworks representing the actual combat undertaken to acquire and maintain that freedom.
The fireworks of the 4th, and those contained in our national anthem, only faintly recreate what many of our people have chosen to undergo to attain and preserve our freedoms. The first real explosions occurred at Lexington and Concord, and escalated into a long war of attrition, mainly of colonials. Muskets, cannon, and land mines were brutal if inefficient blasts of smoke, fire, fragments, and horrible wounds often leading to lingering death. Our forebears faced these all with extraordinary resilience, even against the constant enemy of disease which killed far more of them. Explosives, both individual and crew served, became more advanced as our ancestors bore up under the 1812 war of final independence and then the Civil War to save our nationhood from self-destruction. Many future deadly fireworks recurred, some of our own making, some justified, others questionable. Our unique capacity for invention and industrialization of warfare developed ever more overwhelming explosions, culminating in the unimaginable explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Somehow, that unselective firestorm that killed so many innocents has led to our current technologically “selective” explosions of precision weapons. We can now send our fireworks of death through a particular window in a particular house anywhere in the world. This makes our warfare seem as pretty, controlled, and confined a show as our July 4th fireworks. But the experience of delivering or receiving such is no less existential than in the past, and we must remember and realize that actively.
That active memory is accomplished by knowing what our warriors, past and present, have experienced firsthand. Many families are like ours, having members who have lived through conflicts real and potential. My wife’s father crewed a machine gun in Patton’s army all the way to the end of WW II, but during his life we could never fully broach the all too routine daily horrors of combat that he experienced. My daughter’s father-in-law served as a weapons officer aboard F 111 E fighter-bombers during the Cold War, and as he flew missions over Europe carrying weapons, with nuclear devices also available, the realities of what he could do and might be called upon to do were a daily burden. His service required practice with live weapons from time to time, and specific knowledge of how to use those weapons to maximum destructive advantage. I myself had minimal exposure to the meanings of July 4th’s fireworks. In high school ROTC we spent summer camps at Fort Hood, Texas, with the armored divisions there, practicing the craft of warfare with individual and crew-served weapons and becoming familiar with the effects of mortars, tanks, howitzers, and battlefield guided missiles. My most memorable experience was that of the nighttime infiltration course. Here with full packs, rifles, etc, we belly crawled 100 yards through a course covered with gravel, mud, barbed wire, and explosive pits marked with berms wherein grenade-sized non-fragmentation explosives were set off as we passed. The “ceiling” on the course was a series of M60 machine guns firing tracers 44 inches above the ground. All in all the ultimate in “safe” combat, an experience that convinced me of my unsuitability for the real environment. Most other families with involvements with warfare have real warriors available to them.
Those real warriors are our most precious human assets in our celebrations of freedom on July 4th. They are the ones who have lived through the reality of the pretty explosions we see now. They, if willing and given empathetic time, can tell the rest of us the truth of what those celebratory explosions of July 4th fireworks represent. We must all celebrate them, not just our independence, every day.