The Uniform My Mother Tried To Ban

The heater in my hotel room outside Hartsell rattled the whole night, and I lay awake listening to it instead of sleeping, my Army Service Uniform hanging on the back of the bathroom door where I could see it every time I opened my eyes. By six in the morning the creases in that jacket looked sharp enough to leave a mark, and the ribbons on the left breast caught the lamp light every time the heater kicked on and stirred the air in the room.

I already knew what waited for me at that church. I had known it since the phone call two nights before, when my sister told me, in a voice she tried to keep steady, that our mother had “strong feelings” about what I planned to wear.

My name is Lonzo Hollingsworth. I am thirty four years old, a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army, and until six weeks before that morning, I had a father named Colonel Milburn Hollingsworth, United States Army, Retired, deacon at First Baptist, Little League sponsor for eleven straight seasons, and the closest thing Hartsell had to a town patriarch. Everybody in that church had a story about my father. I had thousands of them. Only one mattered to me that morning, and it was the last thing he ever put in writing to me.

The letter came dated three weeks before he died, folded twice, written in the careful block print he used for anything he wanted to survive being read in a hurry. I did not get it until after the funeral, forwarded through my unit’s mail clerk because I was not home to receive it when it first arrived.

Lonzo. When they finally do this right, wear what you earned. Don’t wear it for the town. Wear it for me. I have spent thirty years watching men either be proud of that uniform or ashamed of what they did in it, and you have never once given me a reason to be anything but proud. Make sure they see it. Your mother will tell you otherwise. Trust me on this one.