Reminds me of this past weekend.
More'n twenty five years ago when I was new in San Antonio I used to stop in for coffee and read the paper in the morning at a local Mc Donald's.
This is a military town and there was always a crew of elderly Veterans holding court in one corner, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze.
Met my wife at that very same McDonalds, she would meet her ride to nursing school there, the veterans seen it all.
One guy I would especially sit and talk to was Pete, a retired Cop from Pennsylvania, and retired MP/security in the US Army, a Korean War Veteran.
Eventually I stopped drinking coffee in the morning before school, switched to green tea brewed at home, coffee caffeine made me get mad at the kids instead of just ACTING mad, green tea provides a milder, longer lasting caffeine lift, with no crash afterwards. Of course I quit stopping in to get coffee every morning.
Just stopping in occasionally on weekends years went by, sometimes I'd run into 'em sometimes not. Last time I ran into most of 'em was 2002, when we commiserated about the third recent graduate of our school falling in combat in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Walked in last weekend and, Holy Smoke, if it weren't Pete, eighty years old now, and still going strong, looking pretty damned good for the years he was carrying. We sat and had a long talk, he had beaten a heart attack, his wife had beaten a bout with cancer.
But so disgusted was he with the Veteran's Administration and with Obama in particular, he told me he was considering throwing away his combat infantry badge, and all his service ribbons.
While we sat, an elderly Hispanic man wearing a hat saying "Retired Air Force Veteran" joined us for a few minutes. A soft-spoken individual. He had to get home to look after his wife, sadly suffering from Alzheimer's.
After he left Pete told me the guy had been a POW in Vietnam.
As always, I felt privileged to share their company.
Birdwatcher
