Last night I visited Howard who is eighty eight years old.  I visit him regularly  because he likes someone to talk to.  Having outlived all but one sibling, a son and his wife, life gets lonely.  I would like to think that we can learn from the experiences life has given him.  Some of his life experiences I have heard a few times and others like the one he related last night were new and thought provoking to me.

            A few months before the end of WWII, he was working with an engineering battalion a few miles outside of Paris France.  He participated in the building of different structures, bridges and roads.

            One day, after much stormy weather, the roads were muddy and really a mess.  He was assigned, along with another soldier to take a truck and some German prisoners to an area a short distance away to get some sand for the muddy roads.  The prisoners were given shovels and were to load the truck with some sand from a hillside.  Because of the wet weather, the other soldier stayed in the truck while Howard stood by the hillside with his carbine, watching the prisoners load the truck.  He didn’t see it coming…one of the prisoners rushed him and knocked him down.  Dazed, and trying to get his bearings, it was then, that he realized that part of the sandbank on the hillside had caved in.  Had he remained where he had been standing, he would have been crushed.  The prisoner helped him up, brushed him off and then leaned over, picked up his carbine rifle, brushed the sand off of it and handed it to him.  The prisoner then went back to his shovel.

            The thought then came to Howard that these prisoners were people just like him.  They were patriotic people, serving their country just like him, and probably didn’t want the war anymore then he did. 

            Having listened to this tale, my thoughts reverted to my all time favorite scene from a movie.  In the movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales”, Josey confronts the   Comanche Chief “ Ten Bears"  The dialogue that follows comes from that meeting.

Josey Wales: That's true. I ain't promising you nothing extra. I'm just giving you life and you're giving me life. And I'm saying that men can live together without butchering one another.

Ten Bears: It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... or death. It shall be life.

         Mutual respect applies to all generations and peoples.  Governments would do well to learn of the “iron in your words.”  In other words “honesty and respect.”