So, it’s late on Sunday, 11 November 2018, Veteran’s Day in the United States of America. The most important veteran that I celebrate today is my father, Plumer Jean Cody, who served in the Air Force from early in the 1950s — maybe even from ’48 or ’49 — into the early 1960s. His service was probably the most significant individual experience in his life, and before he, at sixty-five years old, walked on into the next world on 7 November 1996, twenty-two years ago, he and Mom had begun attending reunions of the 602nd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, Birkenfeld, Germany. He was really enjoying those reunions.

On the twenty-second anniversary of his leaving us, I was reading the 7 November entry from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. That day’s reading is titled “Working for Peace.” Here’s what Merton wrote on 12 November 1961, less than two weeks before I turned three years old and sometime near the period when Dad retired from the Air Force and we moved our mobile home from Trailer Town in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the end of the long yard at the Reeves homeplace in Walnut:

I must pray more and more for courage, as I certainly have neither the courage nor the strength to follow the path that is certainly my duty now.

With the fears and rages that possess so many confused people, if I say things that seem to threaten their interests or conflict with obsessions, then I will surely get it.

It is shocking that so many are convinced that the Communists are about to invade or destroy America: “Christians” who think the only remedy is to destroy them first. Who thinks seriously of disarming? For whom is it more than a pious wish, beyond the bounds of practicality?

I need patience to listen, to learn, to try to understand, and courage to take all the consequences and be really faithful. This alone is a full-time job. I dread it, but it must be done, and I don’t quite know how. To save my soul by trying to be one of those who spoke and worked for peace, not for madness and destruction.

November 12, 1961, IV.179

Although I didn’t write in Gabriel’s Songbook about a military man like my dad, I’ve begun to adapt rumors, legends, and stories heard about Dad’s time in the Air Force into other pieces I’m writing. Although I’m not a poet, here are the closing lines from a poem I wrote about him:

That night he shed his life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes

and would have been surprised by all who braved

early snows to see him laid down

in a proud soldier’s grave.

Southern Poetry Anthology, VI: Tennessee