DELIBERATELY DIVERSE | Rev. Pierce, vicar of St. James’ Episcopal Church
“Deliberately Diverse” represents the individual thoughts and opinions of a group of Taylor friends who almost never completely agree about anything but are gratified by the opportunity to stimulate deliberately diverse discussions in our beloved community. Today’s column represents the thoughts and opinions of Rev. Terry Pierce, NOT the Taylor Press.
Commander Joe Edwin Pierce, United States Naval pilot and father to four girls, was killed in action in March, 1954 in the South China Sea. I was eleven months old, the youngest of those four girls. We each chose in later life to keep his name, not to dismiss our marriages, but to honor the larger-thanlife figure who was our father.
The stories I have about Joe are mostly from my sisters. Before joining the Navy, he was a sports reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche Journal. He loved writing and he loved flying airplanes. In training, he once crashed a plane in the bay at Corpus Christi. While in normal times, that would have been cause for dismissal from flight school, he continued and served as a pilot in World War II and the Korean War.
In my mid 20s, I visited Arlington National Cemetery with my mother. At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as we watched the changing of the guard, she told me tearfully that my dad particularly loved the ceremony of the Navy, the marching and flag display, the pomp and the ceremony. It is that pomp and ceremony, honoring what has come before and the stake we all have in what this nation will become, that is what Independence Day celebrations mean to me.
My mother was a pacifist. She hated war with all the love for my father that had been stolen from her when he was killed. My sisters and I grew up in the generation that protested the Vietnam war; protested the absurdity that our step-brother might be lost as our father had been.
A college acquaintance was convicted of flying the American flag upside-down from his balcony and sentenced to six months in the Dallas County Jail. He was a slender, kind young man who never recovered from that horrific six months.
As a priest, I serve with men whose lives were forever changed by their honorable service as chaplains in the Iraq war. Patriotism is complicated and it exacts at times a cruel and inexplicable price.
Like my mother, I become tearful visiting places like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or watching military marches. My father’s remains were not recovered and he is now remembered at the Arlington National Cemetery In Memoriam section with headstones for those, like him, whose remains have been lost. When I lived in Pennsylvania, I would visit and sit under a nearby tree, listen to the woodpeckers and tell him all my life’s troubles. It was comforting to have a place to visit.
Patriotism is complicated. Today I celebrate those who have served our country and those who have held us accountable. I celebrate the marchers and the kneelers, the ones who gave their lives and the ones who call us to peace. It is for all that our founders offered their lives, fortune and honor when they signed the Declaration of Independence.
