FEATURED JOBS
A certain amount of skepticism can always be a useful tool, we’re all taught when coming up in the journalism field. “Never lose it,” a journalism teacher once told me. Avoid sentimentality or emotionalism. Don’t allow yourself to get snowballed by nostalgia and maudlin talk or ideas. Keep your antennae up. You know, all that hard-boiled reporter stuff.
But sometimes, something gets you right in the kishkes when you cover an event and the emotion just leaves a large lump in your throat.
That’s how I felt on a recent Friday afternoon when I joined about 20 residents of the Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville on a visit to BWI-Thurgood Marshall Airport to greet military troops returning home from Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.
The Charlestown group goes monthly to BWI as part of Operation Welcome Home Maryland, and they’re led by resident Suzanne Levitt. Dressed appropriately in red, white and blue, Suzanne is like everyone’s mom, aunt or favorite family friend. Thin and blonde, she is friendly, caring, smart, funny and what my own mother would call a “ballabuste,” someone who always gets things done.
A Chizuk Amuno congregant, Suzanne decided to form the Charlestown group after going to an Operation Welcome Home Maryland gathering at the airport about three years ago.
From the outset, I knew that going with the Charlestown folks to see the returning troops would be an emotional experience of sorts. How could it not be? But standing there in the BWI international terminal with several of the residents who are World War II veterans, I had to take off my reporter’s hat for a while and simply listen in awe. I truly felt like I was a flea among giants, listening to their own stories about coming home after the war.
“I remember we came home from the Pacific and wound up sailing into San Francisco’s harbor,” one vet said to me. “We saw Alcatraz, and we joked, `That’s where we’ll be soon.’”
When I told the fellas that my own father was in WW2 and at D-Day, I could tell my stock rose somewhat in their eyes. “Oh, he was a Merchant Marine?” one gentleman said to me. “They were the real heroes of the war, y’know.”
But what really got me, of course, was seeing the troops returning home. Tired, weary and ready to get to their next flights, they looked absolutely stunned when they walked into the terminal and saw hundreds of people – young and old – standing there, cheering them, screaming like they were rock stars, holding up signs thanking them for fighting terrorism and making incredible sacrifices for all of us.
One Operation Welcome Home Maryland volunteer, a Vietnam vet, said to me, “I do this for them because no one ever did anything like this for me when I came home.” Then, a look came across his face. “Well, nobody except people you don’t want greeting you,” he said, “protesters who are calling you names like `baby-killer.’”
There was nothing resembling that at BWI that Friday afternoon. Soldiers beamed as a cordoned-off line of people offered handshakes, backslaps, high-fives and boatloads of praise to them. When passing by my WW2 vets from Charlestown, many of the military personnel simply put down their gear, shook their hands and thanked them for what they did in fighting for freedom more than six decades ago.
Watching these soldiers, the old and the young, with smiles and tears in their eyes as they gazed upon each other was truly an amazing sight, something I’ll never forget, and a great honor.
I guess even journalists are human beings and are capable of emotions from time to time, despite our constant striving for objectivity and rational approaches. But going to see this display of patriotism only a little more than a week before Passover, the Feast of Freedom, was truly a wonderful experience. And I would advise everyone to contact Operation Welcome Home Maryland and see this at least once in your life. You owe it to yourself and the troops.
I also want to thank Suzanne Levitt and the other Charlestown folks for what they do, and for allowing me to share the experience.
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