Raymond Harris helped build General Electric jet engines and when the River Works held open houses and allowed visitors into the sprawling West Lynn plant, Harris brought his daughter to see the big engines and the helicopters they powered.
“She sat in one of the helicopters when she was 8 or 9 and said, ‘I’ll fly one of these one day,'” Raymond Harris said.
Jennifer J. Harris got her wish and Sunday marks the 14th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps captain’s combat death in Iraq. Go online and read about Jennifer Harris and you will find a photograph of a young woman with bright eyes and a big smile.
Harris, according to one testimonial describing her service, was the first woman to fly for Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 364, a storied unit whose members took pride in never turning away from a “hot LZ.”
Harris was buried in Swampscott Cemetery on a numbingly-cold February day and, on Sunday, Raymond Harris and other family members, friends and veterans will gather in the cemetery to remember his daughter’s service.
I walk most mornings past the small memorials on the Swampscott Town Hall lawn honoring Harris and Jared J. Raymond, who was killed in Iraq on Sept. 19, 2006 while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Whipping winds, ice storms, snow and torrential rains can’t manage to blow away or knock over the little wooden stick flags stuck in the ground by the memorials honoring Harris and Raymond. Or, if they do, someone always seems to show up and stick another flag in the ground.
Lincoln, in what historians refer to as the “letter to Mrs. Bixby,” saluted the widow who lost five sons in the Civil War. Summoning the language that made him one of America’s greatest orators and writers, Lincoln ended the letter by noting ” …the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
Raymond Harris is very familiar with that sacrifice. So are thousands of other American parents.
My uncle, father, father-in-law, a cousin and two of my neighbors’ sons wore our country’s uniform. They never talked to me about sacrifice, but the memory of serving their country was or is burned into their minds.
I glanced up the street at the little flags fluttering in the wind late last year as I watched Black Lives Matter and Trump supporters scream at one another. The demonstrators were waving their own flags and I wondered if they ever took time out from their tirades to contemplate the sacrifice made by Jennifer Harris and Jared Raymond to keep the American flag flying over Swampscott and every other town in America.
We’re all waging a war against COVID-19 that seems to drag on and on and continue to claim casualties. Politicians in Washington D.C. keep disagreeing without getting much done and the reckoning on race in America seems just as urgent and unresolved today as it did in 1864.
Somewhere between the political battles and the misinformation wars waged on social media, we need to find a way as individuals and as a nation to do more than just salute veterans.
We need to make their health, including mental health, their housing, jobs, and retirement security our priorities and the politicians’ priorities. Most of all, we must make sure veterans receive, in Lincoln’s words, “the thanks of the Republic.”
