By DAVID WILFONG
CNHI
Washington, DC —
Wednesday was a bad day in my hometown, there’s really no other way around it.
When you are bringing back a hometown boy from war, and he didn’t make it ... it’s bad.
I’m proud of the hometown folks, everybody from Greenville all the way to Rest Haven, for lining up the streets and bringing the flags and showing their support. However, we all know that in times like this anything we say or do is appreciated but woefully inadequate to the loss that one of our families feels.
To the family of Spc. Jerod Osborne, my deepest condolences. I’m very sorry for your loss. I hope the healing process will be as quick as possible, but I also know it will never be complete.
There are others I am sorry for as well.
I went to Main Street in Royse City because I assumed, correctly, that folks out there would make a showing on the street for the procession as they brought Osborne back into Rockwall on State Highway 66.
The flags were set out on Main Street and the city staff actually e-mailed a memo out to the downtown community to let them know. The post office responded by lowering the flag to half-mast.
As the time was drawing nearer and more people started showing up, I noticed one woman getting a few hugs from friends and heard her tell them that she would be OK until the procession drove by. I discovered that she has been there before. She buried her son too.
I’m very sorry for that as well.
It wasn’t very much longer before I had another woman tell me that she had just gotten off of her cell phone with a friend that was a little further down the road toward Rockwall. She said that the Rockwall-Heath teachers had organized a group to gather at one of the intersections on the way to the funeral home. Apparently the turnout was quite large there too.
I know it has to be hard for Osborne’s former teachers. With all the griping and struggling that goes on regarding funding and mandates and scheduling and testing — all the legislative hassles involved in education — teachers still invest a lot of time, effort and love into the students that file through their classrooms on the way to adulthood.
And I know the good teachers also invest a lot of hope.
I know a lot of you teachers are hurting, and I’m sorry for that as well.
The list gets longer as friends and the community gets thrown into the mix. Each and every person is part of the lives of so many people that I don’t think we often appreciate the full value of an individual’s life until it gets taken away from us.
It’s also sadly ironic that Osborne was a medic, a “healer.”
His part in the conflict was to try to repair the damage that the combatants on the field caused. Quite often, though you don’t hear about it much in the media, our military’s medics are called on to assist civilians injured in the combat zone and often even enemy soldiers as well. As I understand it, Osborne represented us well there too.
It’s a very, very dangerous job that Osborne stepped forward to do, but if there was nobody to do it the casualties from the conflicts overseas would be so very much higher.
And while we are licking our wounds here in Rockwall, we have to realize and remember all of the other communities that are dealing with this all over the country. Jerod Osborne didn’t die alone that day, and that incident is nowhere near isolated. This scene has repeated itself thousands of times.
We don’t live in a safe world, and we need to remember and thank those that willingly take on more than their share of the danger.
