Remember the Alamo

The neighborhood surrounding the Menger Hotel has a strong attraction to heroes. The San Antonio landmark was built in the 1850s, about 20 years after scores of freedom fighters were massacred at the Alamo, still standing directly across the street. In the 1890s, Teddy Roosevelt used the hotel’s bar to recruit troops for his Rough Riders.

More than a century later, the Menger still evokes images of a bygone America, an era when noble visionaries forged a free and mighty nation.

By happy accident we find ourselves ensconced in the Menger’s bar on a sunny afternoon, drinks in hand, time to kill: five professionals, mostly late 40s, friends for decades. Smart and hard-working, yes, but also the beneficiaries of considerable largess -- education, opportunity, the best the U.S. has to offer. We bear little resemblance to Rough Riders, little resemblance to those who died willingly on the walls of the Alamo.

Our grand and noble mission is to entertain ourselves between games at the NCAA’s college basketball tournament. An annual and semi-extravagant “boys’ weekend” combining sports, four-star hotels, gourmet meals and tumblers of premium brand liquor.

Huddled in the corner of the bar are four younger men, drinking in both the scenery and their domestic beers. The only apparent commonality between these groups is the telltale clinking of a coin, the unmistakable sound of a popular drinking game.

On a lark I leap from our table to theirs, issuing a friendly challenge, joining their game, intending to stay for only a moment.

The ensuing spontaneous combustion produces an extraordinary confluence of astonishingly disparate lives. In a nanosecond, the tables merge. Coins fly fast and furious around a hastily created battlefield. Glasses are hoisted, beers are downed, belly laughs dominate all other noise. The younger men are on liberty from Ft. Hood, a few hundred miles northeast of San Antonio, seeking frolic and adventure. Their impending Iraqi deployment is four days hence.

Between shots and beers we swap jokes and stories. They speak of their coming mission. They are scouts, part of the 4th Infantry. They have been on pins and needles for weeks. They are not wild-eyed and bloodthirsty. They are not going for glory, and they are not going for gore. They are not afraid.

They are well equipped, well trained. They are going to do a job their nation asks them to do. They understand the price of the freedom they confer upon us all. They ask to see photographs of our children. They say the images represent what they are fighting for. Me, I have an 18-year-old son. He is not much younger than they.

One, whom they call “V,” is just a boy, trying to be a man. I sense he has had few role models for that formidable task. He does, however, have a wife. She is eight months pregnant. They are expecting a girl. He eagerly anticipates meeting his daughter when he returns from combat. He hopes that’s before her first birthday.

They are certain they will all be home soon. They have rock-solid faith in those who will “have their backs,” just as they have rock-solid faith in their own unfailing commitments to protect the backs of their comrades. They are unfazed by the voices of protest at home and abroad, loud and shrill, projected day and night by indelible imagery. Dispassionately, they tell us they fight for the rights of those who oppose their mission so passionately.

We buy them drinks, and then dinner on the San Antonio Riverwalk. We dine in such restaurants frequently; they, not at all. They thank us profusely, addressing us as “sir” despite our admonitions not to. They are so very young. We are not so very old.

I could never be a soldier. I am not brave. I could never follow blindly the commands of others, my supposed “superior officers.” I am selfish. Likely I lack many other qualities that these men have, and on which their very lives now depend. We give them e-mail addresses and implore them to tell us, when they can, how they are doing and what small comforts of home we might send. They demur; they say they need very little. Truly, they say, they want all of us just to say “thank you.”

Hate this war, if you wish. You are free to despise the politics and the politicians. But do not direct your anger at those bearing arms, selflessly doing the dirtiest, riskiest jobs that a nation might ask its youth to do.