The Honor Guard That Refused to Fold

I told him the bylaws did not say a word about age. They said veteran, honorably discharged, dues paid. That was all.

Desmond had a phone full of names before I finished my coffee. Men and women he had served with who had moved back to this part of the state after their own time was up and never once thought a VFW hall had anything to offer somebody in their thirties. He called a Marine Corps sergeant named Camille Petrakis, who had done a tour in Afghanistan and now worked as the nurse at the middle school, and who told him later she had been meaning to find a way back into a room full of people who understood her without an explanation for two years and just never knew Ash Fork had one. He called a National Guard staff sergeant from three towns over. He put up a flyer at the co-op, another at the church, and a third taped to the door of the diner where every farmer in the county eats breakfast, and it did not ask anybody to save a building. It asked them to come stand in a room with people who had worn the same uniform they had.

The Methodist ladies heard about it through the same grapevine that hears about everything in Ash Fork, and the Sunday before our roster meeting they set out an extra folding table at the potluck just for veterans, unasked, with a hand-lettered sign that said nothing more than come sit with us. Six people did who had never once, in years of living here, told anybody at that church they had served. I sat across from a woman I had known for a decade only as the register clerk at the hardware store and learned for the first time that she had spent two years loading cargo planes in the Air Force before she ever set foot in Ash Fork. She showed up at the roster meeting three days later.