The Time of Our Lives by Tom Brokaw

Author:Tom Brokaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780679643920
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE PROMISE

Jenny has become an advocate for other wounded veterans, writing regularly on a website called CaringBridge, an information center for families with members who are struggling with war wounds, cancer, or other debilitating conditions. In a cheerful tone she describes shopping trips to Walmart, or Corey helping the children with a bubble bath, all of which underscores her strong belief that the Pentagon and the VA have to place more emphasis on the whole family of wounded veterans.

“Remember,” she told me, “I have to be in charge of the constant changes in his care from year to year to year. They worry primarily about his immediate care or just his hospital stay.”

Then she brightens when she describes their now twice annual trips to Colorado, where Corey has become a regular in a program called Challenge Aspen, which offers a recreational opportunity for wounded vets. “It’s awesome,” Jenny said. “Corey has been white-water rafting and skiing two years now and he loves it.” In a photograph on the Challenge Aspen website there are Jenny and Corey with two other couples, the guys with baseball caps, broken bodies in wheelchairs, giving the thumbs-up sign, as their young wives tenderly embrace them.

When Corey came to a lecture I gave on the University of South Dakota campus in the fall of 2010 I was encouraged by the progress he was making with his speech clarity, and so I asked a family friend, “How’s his vision?” She answered with a laugh, “Oh, it’s improving, too. He likes to say he can see hot girls and cool cars.”

When I visited the Briests at their home Jenny was quick to point out that Corey seldom uses the elevator anymore. “He works his way down that wide staircase to the family room,” hanging on to the handrails on either side, she told me.

They enjoy watching movies together, Jenny explaining to Corey what he’s missing visually as he listens to the dialogue. His daughter, Kylie, reads stories to him—a reversal of the father-daughter role he hopes someday to change. Since Kylie is nine, he figures he has time to work on his walking so he can accompany her down the aisle on her wedding day.

When I think about the support the Briests get back home, I am reminded of other young couples in working- and middle-class communities for whom the price of their service will go on forever. They’re part of our common heritage, and yet in the leafy, moneyed suburbs of Louisville, on Park Avenue in New York or the Gold Coast of Chicago, in pricey neighborhoods in Silicon Valley or the country club districts of Kansas City or Miami, they remain an invisible part of our population, these fellow citizens who have paid such a high price.

In a nation of democratic ideals, including justice for all, this is manifestly unjust.

It is time to renew the ideal of public service for all on a national scale—and answer the call John F. Kennedy made so memorably a half century ago.

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