There are those pictures that you see that take your breath away and then make you cry. This one was in last Sunday’s Bergen Record on Mother’s Day. A Lodi mother hugging the casket of her son, the day before Mother’s Day, just before he is buried. I can’t stop thinking about this photo.
This was the day after I was arguing with my teenage son about the military. He was “half-joking” about joining after high school. I told him he needed to go to college first. My worse fear is that some recruiter nails him as an 18 year old CHILD as he signs his life away. And I wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.
I stared at this picture for a long time and read the story.
The boy grew up in Lodi. Went to Lodi High. Sgt. Vincenzo Romeo and his family immigrated to this country from Italy when he was a toddler. He joined the military after a year at college. I read about the service at St. Joseph’s and how the funeral procession went past his home one last time on its way to the cemetary in Paramus.
He was killed with several other young men from across the country, the youngest 19, when an IED hit their truck in Iraq.
And for what? Why are we there? They don’t want us there. And as we suspected the information that got us on that side of the world was bogus. Who has it benefited? The large corporations that are making money off the military.
Yes, 3,000+ funerals of sons, daughters, mother and fathers. 25,000 injured U.S. soldiers. And these injured? In the past many of these injuries would have killed them on the spot, but now due to the ability of our medicine to save more of them, they are coming home missing limbs and brain injuries to an indifferent VA system that can’t handle them nor give them the proper aftercare they need. These poor, poor families.
So I took that article and picture and made my son read it as I stood over him and I cried for this mother that will never see her son again and will forever celebrate Mother’s Day with a folded flag.
