Obama and a lifetime pledge, renewed

[bemildred]

You have to read it all.

On an Army post, you don't need a watch to know what time it is. Bugle calls announcing the day's significant events blast from a multitude of speakers, starting with "Reveille" at 0600 hours and ending with "Taps" at 2300 hours.

My father was a career officer in the U.S. Army, so I grew up on bases far from our home state of Hawaii. On base, schoolchildren were exempt from responding to most of the bugle calls, save one. Toward sunset, the day cooling, we were usually outdoors after school, playing in some riotous way. But when we heard those first baleful notes of the bugle playing "Retreat," we knew that the American flag was being lowered and that we were to pay our respect. We would throw down our bikes, hop out of tree swings and drop our marbles or jump-ropes.

Across the base, every activity came to a halt; traffic stopped, people got out of their cars, and everyone, everywhere, stood at attention. Quietly, almost reverently, we all turned to where we knew the American flag had been flying all day. We knew which way to face as well as we knew which way home was. We placed our hands on our hearts. Just after the last note of the bugle trailed away with the light of the sun, a single round of cannon fire sounded, and we knew the ceremony was complete. Play resumed.

By the time I was old enough to understand what the flag stood for -- and what a pledge really was -- I had seen much of the political divides and wars around which the Army's mission is organized. I was in Berlin when the wall went up dividing the Communist East from the democratized West. My earliest memory is of seeing a gravestone in a sidewalk, marking the place where an East Berliner jumped to her death rather than live under the totalitarian Soviet regime.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-daniels22-2009jan22,0,3218184.story