I lost one of my favorite people Sunday. My Uncle Larry — my only uncle — drowned in a boat accident on his favorite lake. He’d spent the night on the lake, and Aunt Cathy spoke to him around 10:30 pm. That was the last we heard of him. His boat drifted into a cove with Dabo, the golden retriever, standing in the bow confused. A person who lived in the cove called the local police and a search began with all the bells and whistles: helicopters, boats, sonar, the works. A fisherman found his body about 7:30 yesterday morning. Cause of death was freshwater drowning.

All of us will miss him. He was one of those people who was capable of filling up a room whenever he entered one. He loved everyone. I don’t remember ever seeing him not smiling. He was always full of mischief. I told his oldest son, my cousin Zach, I didn’t believe Uncle Larry was dead until he told me he’d seen his body. We both held out hope he would show up looking bedraggled and contrite having pulled some foolish stunt to worry everyone even though he meant no harm. This time though, it wasn’t one of Uncle Larry’s pranks; he was really gone.

Sunday was Uncle Larry and Aunt Cathy’s fortieth wedding anniversary as well. As a tow-haired eight-year-old I had been the ringbearer in their wedding where I refused to walk down the aisle right before the wedding started because I learned the rings on my little satin pillow were fake. By that point, Uncle Larry had already been a part of my life for years.

I have many memories of Uncle Larry — entirely too many to list them all, but three stand out in my mind particularly strongly. One was when I was a preteen and he and one of his friends took me to Commerce, GA to the Thunder National Drag Races. Uncle Larry was a car fanatic. He was never quite as happy as when he was behind the wheel of a fast car like one of the Corvettes he drove. We went to the races in his little Dodge Omni and the day was cold and overcast; I almost froze and we went to Wendy’s on the way home. Uncle Larry let me walk around the cars and grounds to my heart’s content. I wasn’t used to such freedom. Whenever I went anywhere with an adult, I was usually chained by a stern look to her side, but then, Uncle Larry never exactly passed for an adult.

Uncle Larry also taught me to drive, which is a good thing because if I’d had to wait on Mama to teach me I’d still be riding a bicycle. The first car I ever drove on my own was his and Cathy’s 1978 Chevy Camaro which was special ordered with a more powerful engine. I remember being fourteen years old (not a legal driving age in South Carolina, by the way) driving down I-385 doing about 80 mph (not a legal speed in South Carolina, by the way), because it wasn’t a car to be driven slowly. We passed a highway patrolman in the other lane and I panicked. I asked Uncle Larry what I was supposed to do if the trooper flipped around and came after us. He smiled and said, “Take the next exit, turn right, and floor it. He can’t catch us!” Much of my driving attitude as a teenager can be chalked up to my driving instructor.

The last memory I have of Uncle Larry is also one of the earliest. It showed me more than anything what it was I loved about the man. I was six years old and we were eating dinner at Granny and Papa Wham’s house to celebrate Aunt Cathy’s birthday. Dinner was over and I was playing with my Hot Wheels in the floor near the old, nonworking stereo. Voices started raising. It was the time my parents’ marriage was disintegrating. All the adults were either yelling or crying and I just tried to concentrate on my little cars — making them go in circles.

Suddenly, two big arms scooped me up and I was on Uncle Larry’s shoulder going out the back door. He said we were going to get ice cream. I know I beamed because I loved ice cream as much then as I do now. We got in his car — this Corvette was blue — and he sat me on his lap in the driver’s seat. He let me “drive” all the way to The Community Snack Bar where he got us both a big Styrofoam cup of soft serve vanilla with Hershey’s syrup on top. We ate slowly and he let me “drive” back to Granny and Papa’s house. It was quiet when we got back. I realized once I was old enough to process it how Uncle Larry had wanted to shield me from all the anger in the house and he did it the only way he knew how, with a car and ice cream.

Now he’s gone and it is a tremendous loss.

Don’t misunderstand me, Uncle Larry was great and I loved him dearly, but he had his flaws and his demons as we all do. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t dwell on any of them here. As it is, they don’t really matter anymore. All that matters is he was beyond a doubt one of the people I loved most on this rock and he’s also one of those people I never really imagined ever not being around, until he was gone.

I will miss him and mourn his loss for a long, long time.

Love y’all, and keep those feet clean.

I grew up on 18.6 acres of land in rural Gray Court, SC. The story of the land and how it ended up like it did and further on how I ended up owning 6.2 acres outright would be a whole ‘nother long, long post. For now, all you really need to know is a buddy of mine is renovating the old farmhouse on the land I own and when he gets it finished, I’m going to sell it to him.

So here’s the deal. My maternal grandmother lived in the old farmhouse as caretaker for my paternal great-uncle. Believe me, it’s complicated beyond belief so I’m just hitting the high points. Ima took care of Uncle Carrol for a number of years and even continued living in the house for a few years after he moved to a nursing home. Over the course of those intervening years, Mama used some of the closets out there to store some boxes. The boxes were forgotten to history for thirty years.

Here begins our tale.

My buddy found these forgotten boxes with my name on them as he was working on converting a bedroom to a bathroom and was in the closet doing some plumbing. He told me about the boxes and I told him to bring them by the house when he got a chance and I’d go through them. He brought them and I went through them.

Here’s where our tale gets interesting, well, at least for me.

Dana was out for the evening with friends when Carlos stopped by with this load of past for me. We brought the boxes into my office, sat them in the floor, and proceeded to get all Indiana Jones on them. I was half a layer into the first box when I realized I should have told Carlos to take them by the dump and save me the slap in the face from the memories wafting out of those boxes along with the rancid smell of mouse pee and poop.

The four boxes spanned my entire pre-postsecondary academic career from the tin can pencil holder I made Mama in kindergarten to some papers from my first year of college. A lot of items came out of those boxes heavy with memories, memories in more than one case I didn’t want.

Mama kept every certificate of achievement I ever got from K-12. She kept every newspaper clipping from the Laurens Advertiser with me in it somewhere. They were all still here, right beside pounds of notes and cards from two ex-girlfriends I did wrong. My plaque for being on my junior high school’s championship academic team rested beneath the jumping fish trophy I received from my wrestling teammates after my freshman year. I was the “flopping fish” of the year and the trophy reminded me of a dismal 0-16 record.

One box had a box within it containing loads of memorabilia from Camp Broadstone, the summer camp where I spent two weeks each during my seventh and eighth grade summers. It was full of letters from friends made those four glorious weeks when I was happier than I’d ever been before and than I’ve ever been since. We made crude “yearbooks” and signed them with our undying friendship pledged over and over. Each letter, each rustic “craft” was a dagger in my soul because we didn’t keep up with each other and now those four weeks are getting hazy over thirty-five years later. Tears came to my eyes as I handed the entire box to Carlos and asked him to dump them outside in the trash.

I threw away nearly everything I came across. Ribbons from high school football games. Awards for the best essay in the county on water conservation. In some instances the mice had saved me by destroying things I didn’t want to deal with. I wasn’t ready for this kind of nostalgia. These boxes contained proof I once had a bright future with the chance to be and do whatever I could put my mind to.

They were from before the anxiety attacks. Before the crippling depression. Before I lost one career doing what I thought was right and another because I couldn’t get over losing the first. Before I started down this dark, dismal road.

It hurt to remember. I would have broken down in sobs, but Carlos was with me and I’m still a man with a man’s pride and its accompanying refusal to show weakness in front of another man. So I forged on through the boxes; I beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Little from the boxes remained. Carlos filled up the big black rolling trashcan outside with memories I could barely tolerate.

Now only one small box remains and I’m going to have Budge go through it ruthlessly and throw away as much as she can of the things my heart couldn’t bear to let go. She is nowhere near as sentimental as me so she can purge the house of these past haunted relics.

You would think the night could get no worse than meticulously poking around in the scar tissue of my soul. Surely this is as low as it could get? Sadly, you would be wrong.

I hadn’t opened the fourth box.

The fourth box was more Mama’s box than mine. I should have tossed the box then and there and let a dead dog decompose in peace, but I was already in what we southerners call “a state” as it was so I was in no position to stop this plane from full throttling into yon craggy mountain of memory.

I wish I’d been stronger.

You must understand something vitally important to know. Mama married at 16. She had me at 18. She was single again by 25. Also, and this is crucial, Mama was not a plain, homely woman. The fourth box contained proof of that. Years worth of Valentine’s cards and love notes lay in a neat pile. I recognized some of the names; some I didn’t. Two in particular caused me to almost vomit because of the anguish they had put Mama through. I spat on one’s grinning face and shattered the frame of the other. They both had the good sense to die before I ever crossed paths with either of them so my true vengeance was spoilt, but dead they are and no torment is too much for them.

I have an image of Mama that has withstood all life has thrown at it. Her pedestal is not so high as it once was because I know things now I didn’t know then, but I was not so big a fool as to read what other men thought about my mother. I can take a lot, but too much is too much. I gathered up all the cards and letters and gave them to Carlos and into the big black trashcan they went. I still remember Mama as my mama, not as a woman and I don’t think my heart will ever bear to change that.

Now again, you’d think the night was over and it was time to lick my wounds, take a Xanax, and try to recover, but the night still had one trick left to play and it lay in the bottom of the box.

Right at the bottom of the box — the godforsaken box — was another, smaller box. This box, when opened, proved to be full of letters as well, but these were different. They were all in red, white, and blue envelopes. Some were crisp and clean even after fifty years. Some were stained with mud — the mud from the hills of Vietnam. Lying in front of me was a treasure beyond measure. I picked the package up and held in my hand every letter Daddy wrote Mama during his military service. Fifty years on and she had kept them all.

Everything else of Mama’s from the boxes is gone, but the letters sit in a pile on my desk. I don’t know what to do with them. Here is proof positive that once upon a time Daddy actually did love Mama. The pile has a few cards scattered through it too. I’ve read a Father’s Day card I don’t remember signing. Someone got Mama a Mother’s Day card from me as well. It’s all here. The brief moment when my parents had a chance to be together forever . . . before the dark times when love proved to not be enough.

So I have these letters. They are my birthright. They are indelibly connected to my past, but the question is, do I read them? Do I want to see what I would see? On the one hand, maybe I would finally catch a glimpse of young man Mama loved, and loved until the day she died, all others be damned. The young man who never came home the same. The young man Mama told me stories about, but who I never had a chance to meet. Do I want to meet him? Would I even recognize him?

On the other hand, the young man belongs to Mama, just as he did for too brief a time all those decades ago. Should I intrude on their privacy? I barely have any memories of the two of them together and the ones I do are not always pleasant. Would these change years of pain and animosity between Daddy and me? Do I want to know? Can my heart take the answers I might find?

I don’t know what to do.

Love y’all and keep your feet clean.

The British have the Somme; the French, Verdun. However, if the United States Marine Corps Hymn is ever rewritten or updated, right next to the Halls of Montezuma and the Shores of Tripoli will stand the Battle of Belleau Wood. It was the Battle of Belleau Wood where the newly arrived American doughboys received their real baptism of fire in the Great War, and they showed they had a lot to learn, but they were not a bunch to be trifled with.

The American Expeditionary Force began arriving in strength in the spring of 1918. One of the first battles Commanding General John “Black Jack” Pershing had to fight was against his French and British counterparts. After three years of brutal warfare, the Entente forces welcomed the Americans, but the French and British commanders had their own ideas about how the new forces would be used. To the weary Entente commanders, the new troops were warm bodies who could strengthen the depleted ranks of the French and British armies. General Pershing, however, made it clear his boys were here to fight Germans as Americans, not as fill ins. After considerable wrangling, he managed to keep his units together and the Americans moved into the battlelines to face the enemy.

As part of the Spring Offensive, the Germans were marching hard towards Paris and sweeping the Entente forces before them. On 1 June 1918, however, the Germans moved into Belleau Wood near the Marne River and found fresh American troops waiting for them. Now the French had wanted to retreat further away from the woods and construct a new trench line. The Americans were entirely too stubborn for such a move and instead their commander ordered them to, “Die where you stand!” The mixture of Army and Marines dug fighting holes with bayonets and bare hands and waited for the attack. They didn’t have to wait long.

On 3 June, the Germans conducted a massed bayonet charge designed to break the upstart Americans. The upstart Americans responded by keeping their rifles and machine guns silent until the German advance reached the 100 yard mark whereupon the troops received the shouted order to fire at will. The Germans learned Americans could shoot too as the Kaiser’s forces fell by the hundreds, mowed down by deadly accurate fire from shallowly dug in Americans.

Badly mauled, the Germans retreated to a trench line just the other side of Belleau Wood. The French were nominally impressed with the American show of fighting acumen but now strongly advised the American commanders to withdraw from the field to better prepared positions farther back. A Marine captain who overheard the talk of retreat blurted out one of the most famous retorts in all of American military history when he replied, quite loudly, “RETREAT?! HELL, MAN, WE JUST GOT HERE!” The Marines stayed where they were.

Not content with waiting on the Germans to advance again, the Americans launched their own attack in their sector by driving ahead through the woods themselves towards an objective known as Hill 142. The Marines led the way, but in this instance had let the Germans get the better of them. The Marines failed to reconnoiter the wood carefully before the attack and ran directly into two German divisions who didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be there.

The Americans pressed the attack home with bayonets fixed, but men fell like wheat before a scythe. Still, no order for retreat came down the line and so the attack went on. By nightfall, the Americans held Hill 142 with its commanding view of the battlefield below, but of the two companies who started the attack most were dead, including nine of the eleven officers in the charge.

On 6 June, the Marines formed up and launched another assault, this time into the Belleau Wood proper. Before the attack, First Sergeant Dan Daly, twice recipient of the US Medal of Honor in other theaters, looked out over the open ground they would soon be marching across. He noted the enemy positions on the other side then turned to his men and encouragingly screamed at them to, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” His rallying cry is now part of USMC lore and Sergeant Daly one of the most revered Marines.

It would take more than bravado to win this day, however. The Americans stepped off in tight formation, line upon line and found out what the French and British had been trying to tell them all along — attacking shoulder to shoulder in the face of machine guns was a terrible idea. The Marines lost more men on that fateful day than they had ever lost before in a single battle and the total casualty count would not be eclipsed until the worst island invasions of the Pacific Theater in the Second World War. Still, enough troops made it to the German lines to break through and force the Germans into retreat. By nightfall, the Americans held the side of Belleau Wood nearest Paris.

What followed was nearly a solid month of brutal fighting in the wood itself. Natural barriers paired with manmade entrapments turned the scene into one of attack and counter attack often with intense hand to hand fighting. The woods were often so thick with smoke and mist men couldn’t see each other to tell friend from foe. In all, it would take a total of six major assaults by the Marines at a huge cost of 9,777 casualties, included 1,811 killed, to finally expel the Germans from the wood entirely, but this objective was accomplished near nightfall on 26 June 1918.

America had gotten her baptism of blood and fire on the European Continent.

According to legend, the US Marines earned a nickname from the Battle of Belleau Wood. As the story goes, a captured German officer was incredulous at the way the Marines had fought during the battle and he demanded to see these “teufelshunde”, which is German for “devil dogs.” Whether the exchange ever took place is doubtful, but the Marines have been known as Devil Dogs ever since.

Love y’all, and keep your feet clean.

I don’t write political leaning posts as a general rule. I try to stay as apolitical as possible, for my mental health as much as anything because watching the state of our country today played out on the news is as anxiety producing an activity as one could participate in. Sometimes, however, an exception comes along and I cannot, in good conscience, stay silent. The current situation at the US-Mexico border is one of these exceptions.

Since at least early May, the US Border Patrol, under orders from the US Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has implemented a so-called “zero tolerance” policy to those crossing the border illegally. In and of itself, this policy would not have sent me to the computer regardless of what I think. What has happened as an unintended (I hope) consequence of this policy, however, is the forced separation of over 2,300 children from their parents at the border.

The children taken from their parents range in age from middle teens all the way down to eight months old with fully two-thirds of them being what the government is calling “tender age” children meaning they are under twelve years old. I can say, with proof and without hyperbole, the United States government is taking babies from their families who cannot speak, walk, or in any meaningful way care for themselves.

Factions exist in this country that do not see a problem with this policy. A Fox News broadcaster this morning made the statement that separating families was “not a problem.” His reason? “They aren’t doing this to people in Idaho; these are children from another country.” Of course, he is right; these children are from another country.

I also had a person post on my Facebook feed the self-evident advice of “If they don’t want to be separated from their kids, they shouldn’t come to America illegally.” Many commenters supported him and agree with his assessment of the situation.

At what point did we become a nation that strips children away from their families? When did we start taking infants out of their mothers’ arms? As a country, we have fought wars to keep other countries from doing the exact same thing, and if this were taking place somewhere like China -which in all likelihood it is to some extent — we would see impassioned speeches on the floor of both chambers of Congress and it would not take long before a nation doing something so soulless would — at the least — be facing stiff sanctions from the United States.

Now we are the ones doing the separation.

When did we stoop so low?

Actually, this action is not without precedent in our history. For 300 years we took black babies from their mothers’ arms and sold them without compunction to others. For over a century, we took Indian children from their homes and families and sent them to places like Carlisle Indian School where white teachers tried to “save the soul by killing the Indian” in the boys and girls. We have proven as a country we are not above doing what we are now doing; it hides like bad code within our country’s DNA in places we don’t like to talk about in “nice” company.

The public is rallying behind these children. Pressure mounted so much on the White House to do something that our notoriously truculent President Trump went against his iron-fisted immigration policy and signed an Executive Order legally stopping the forced separations. Yet, when questioned closely, a least one White House aide said, on record, the separations were likely to continue anyway because of nothing less than inertia. The Department of Justice doesn’t seem intent on stopping any time soon.

Even if they did, even if from this moment forward not a single child more was separated from his or her family, what about the 2,300+ who are already in tent cities, warehouses, and former Wal-Marts across the nation? I deliberately avoided the phrase “in the system” because no “system” is serving these children.

I serve in my church’s nursery. I hold babies for an hour or so each week so their parents can worship without worry. Before I get that baby, the parents have to provide fingerprints — which are kept on file — and a photo id to a ten member team whose only job is ensuring the safety of the children we get. Once the parents submit their fingerprints and are identified by the Welcome Team, the parents get an entry slip. They bring that slip to me in the baby room and give me the slip and their baby. Halfway through the service, a member of the Welcome Team comes around and visual checks each child against the entry slips and against the class list they print off once the service begins. At the end of service, the parents submit prints and id once again and are issued an exit slip. They bring me that exit slip and once I verify they are who they say they are, they get the baby back. We haven’t lost one yet in 25 years even though we have had more than one attempt made to take a child under our care.

THAT is a system, folks.

No one in either the Trump White House or the Department of Justice, when questioned about the eventual reunification of these 2,300+ children with their families has provided a shred of a plan as to how this is to be done OR WHEN this is to be done. Keep this in mind, the parents are in detention centers around the border in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, but in many instances their children have been flown or bussed as far away as Miami, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; and New York City, New York. These children in many cases are THOUSANDS of miles from their families. Some of them have not spoken to a family member even on the phone for WEEKS.

These children are in centers and foster homes scattered all across the country like so many feathers from an exploded feather pillow. How are we supposed to believe our government is competent enough to have kept up with every single child over those great distances and has the ability and wherewithal to match each child up with the proper family? Our government loses track of people and things every day. What are the odds of at least some of these children NEVER seeing their families again?

I realize plenty of people don’t see a problem. Many agree, openly or tacitly, with the Fox News anchor who says these are other countries’ children. More specifically, these are brown countries and black countries children, and who really cares about them anyway? I know more than one person who feels the world has too many brown and black people in it already.

What would you do if it was YOUR child?

What if YOUR eight-month old infant was taken from you and sent a thousand miles away in the company of complete strangers? What if you miss their first steps? Or their first words? Who is raising YOUR baby? What is standing between YOUR baby and neglect? Abuse? A pedophile? Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Ask yourself this chilling question: With things as up in the air and lax as they are at present, how hard would it be for human traffickers to get their hands on many of these babies and small children who some people already think we don’t have to worry about because “these aren’t our children; they are from another country?” We see stories every month of babies snatched by traffickers from their mothers’ grocery carts with the mothers standing right there. Who is going to stop them from taking a child no one is really even looking for?

Call and email your Congressmen and Senators. Get even more pressure on the government to put these families back together while everyone has a reasonable chance of getting back to the right place. Deport the illegal immigrants if that what has to be done, but in the name of all that is holy, put the families back together before this situation gets any worse.