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Recalling the price of our freedom

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Tom Jackson

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: November 11, 2009

ZEPHYRHILLS - Our emotions are sundered this particular Veterans Day as Americans reconsider what is meant by pulling on the nation's uniform and volunteering to put one's self in harm's way to defend Mr. Jefferson's self-evident truths and Mr. Lincoln's proposition.

We are simultaneously proud and devastated, ennobled and scandalized, steadfast and reeling. Shots ring out in the heart of Texas, and the world's only superpower drops to its knees - to pray, to catch its breath.

Nowhere will our conflicting passions be more evident than on the southeast corner of Zephyr Park, where regular folks who spent days, weeks and months answering a patriotic summons will dedicate the completed Veterans Memorial Walkway, a simple, sobering monument to the guarantors of freedom.

"Because freedom isn't free," says Mike Fike, who has seen a chance discovery on a vacation side trip grow from a nugget of an idea to a full-blown reality in a manner so ripe with cooperation and goodwill that describing it leaves him grasping for words.

The one that leaps to Fike's grateful mind is sufficient: "Amazing."

Those who organized the effort and their eager collaborators who contributed time and physical exertion to its punctual fulfillment are justly proud of the project, a 660-foot red-brick walkway meandering among oaks off the south shore of Lake Zephyr. Interspersed along its languid route are granite blocks and benches engraved with the particulars of Zephyrhills citizens who devoted some portion of their lives to military service.

Says Judson Baggett, walkway committee chairman, "These are the guys" - and accurately and inclusively, gals - "who made it possible for us to criticize presidents and all those other politicians."

Remembering sacrifices

Their sacred contribution will be on the minds of those who gather today at 11 a.m., the celebration solemnized by the horrific events at Fort Hood last week, when a gunman opened fire in a crowded processing center, killing 13 (14, if you include Pvt. Francheska Velez's unborn baby) and wounding 29 others.

"Sometimes we take our blessings for granted," Fike says. "What we should always remember is the sacrifices people made on our behalf." That's what the walkway was always intended to do, but its final dedication could not be timelier.

A general contractor who was president of the Noon Rotarian Club when the plan was hatched as a service project in 2005, Fike - inspired by a veterans memorial he discovered in a small Georgia town - sought veterans to do the heavy organizational lifting and settled on Baggett, a certified public accountant, and Rod Lincoln, a Sonny's Bar-BQ franchisee.

Ultimately, the local Kiwanis and Pilot clubs signed on, as did the city. While service club members rehabilitated thousands of bricks salvaged from the repaving of Fifth Avenue, the city pitched in with concrete curbs and landscaping.

Strolling memory's trail

The completed project is a place for reflection and thanksgiving. It remembers Harry Thain, Baggett's Zephyrhills High classmate, a graduate of West Point who hoped to become an astronaut. Thain died in Vietnam, killed when the Chinook helicopter he was piloting took a mortar round in the cockpit.

It remembers Pfc. George R. Baxmann, killed at Normandy on D-Day plus four, and Sgt. Marcus Mathes, killed on the outskirts of eastern Baghdad April 28, 2008.

It also honors the living, among them Albert A. Micka, a 20-year Army veteran who served in Korea and Vietnam who, on a recent Thursday afternoon, could be found walking an ancient poodle, Clancy.

Micka, an amateur historian who delights in quizzing unsuspecting citizens on the extent of their constitutional knowledge, had a bench dedicated to his service by his family. "Quite a surprise," he says. Linked in perpetuity to the place, Micka is dedicated to patrolling it in return. (A nearby park notwithstanding, skateboarders are a persistent problem.)

But today is not one for dwelling on nuisance issues. This Veterans Day, especially, contains far larger considerations. We could do worse than ponder them while strolling the completed Veterans Memorial Walkway.

For information on purchasing a brick or bench, call Rod Lincoln at (813) 782-1298, or Jud Baggett at (813) 782-4830. Keyword: The Jax Files, for Tom Jackson's bonus insights.

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