Another funeral

Dear Editor,

We were just at a deployment with the Red Cross for some of these military people recently lost in the helicopter crash in Afghanistan, Sgt. Patrick Hamburger, 30, of Lincoln died in the crash.

Condolences and peace to his family, and young daughter, but noted by his step dad, it would be long in coming. The Cornhusker Chapter of the American Red Cross provides first aid to large gatherings around Lincoln and where called.

This year it has been pretty much all around the country as other chapters in Nebraska and nationwide have seen with tornadoes in the South, floods in the North and fires in the Southwest.

Lincoln has its share of needs, too, from house fires, storms, floods, to Memorial Stadium on Big Red game days with 85,000 people. To deployments of service members heading in harm's way, to funerals and homecomings, to little league football.

We will probably be at the next large deployment, funeral or homecoming of our military along with families, officials, fire/EMS/law enforcement, Patriot Guard Riders and, yes, even the group of fanatic/misguided people from the northeast Kansas area.

All I can say to that is, thank God for the Patriot Guard Riders and the gentle support they give in forming a wall of red, white and blue between hate and love. Many of them veterans of a hopefully NOT forgotten war a long long time ago. I am not writing as an official of any sort of the Red Cross, just as a volunteer. Just a volunteer which our father/mother instilled in us, by example or visiting with us about.

As that and a writer I am expressing what my country allows me to see and believe in. Just as I was for the Bobby Kennedy young Democrats group in spring of 1968, we could not vote, but we could hand out information and support our candidate, which we did for him.

Mainly, because we saw in him what his brother Teddy eulogized him with after his senseless death just a few short weeks after many of us in McCook met and chatted personally with him, felt. Some of what Ted and Bobby Kennedy said I feel is so appropriate to our past, today's and future living and lost service people.

"My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'" Ted/Bobby Kennedy

Michael Hartwell

Lincoln, Nebraska