Remembering

I was just listening to George Jones sing "50,000 Names Carved in the Wall" and it started me thinking. I currently have at least 3 cousins overseas and another one getting ready to go back. I say at least because I have cousins in the military that I don't do a good job of keeping track of them. But the ones that I do keep track of, I worry about them.

These boys, no, men now, are the ones that I used to babysit. They're the ones who were like really annoying little brothers at one time. They're two sets of brothers, and I have a lot of great memories with them. Even if we haven't done a good job keeping in touch, I love them.

The one set of brothers were like little brothers when I was younger. They stayed with an aunt of ours for a while and when they lived with her family my family was there a lot too. I can remember being so annoyed at the little nerds who just wanted to be considered cool by the only other boy in the group. (Of course that meant declaring war on the girls.) We used to joke about if you set them loose on a town they would have it leveled in a few days. Now one of them is training to be a demolitions expert. I tease him mercilessly about how fitting the job is.

The other set of brothers are the ones that I remember babysitting when I was a teenager. They tried to convince me that a good game to play would be to tie me up and put me in the closet and then time how long it would take me to get out. (I never fell for that.) The youngest also tried to tell me that his mom fed him 5 pounds of sugar every night before putting him to bed. I can remember them deciding that it would be fun to start calling me mom when we were out in public. Even when we went to get icecream at the diner that my latest crush worked at. They loved to embarrass me. The youngest ended up guarding President Reagan's remains during the viewing at the rotunda. He's now somewhere in Africa. The oldest took a post closer to the front lines because he was put in charge of that camp (or whatever it's called).

I don't talk about them much, but I worry about them. It just doesn't seem possible that the little terrors are old enough to fight and die for our country. Please pray for our military members, they need it.