A Story For Your Memorial Day

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This song by Lee Brice has charted well, and it's a heart tugging tear jerker. But wait, it turns out that it is true:

Then came the part of the interview that hit me hardest: It was the moment when Paul Monti talked about his son’s truck, and why he still has it, and still drives it. 

“What can I tell you? It’s him,” Jared’s father explained, nearly choking on his words. “It’s got his DNA all over it. I love driving it because it reminds me of him, though I don’t need the truck to remind me of him. I think about him every hour of every day.”

I was already tearing up before that story about Jared’s truck. But as the details piled up — the truck was a Dodge 4X4 Ram 1500 with decals on it that included the 10th Mountain Division, the 82nd Airborne Division, an American flag, and a Go Army sticker — I lost it.

And there I was sitting in my car in a Walmart parking lot on a sunny Memorial Day in my hometown crying hard. Crying like a child. Crying as if I’d lost my child.

I wasn’t the only one in a car crying that day. It turns out that a Nashville songwriter named Connie Harrington was in her car, too, listening to the very same story. Moved to tears, she pulled over to the side of the road, scribbling notes as the story proceeded.

She wrote down detail upon detail, everything she could remember. When she got back home, Harrington couldn’t get that story of the soldier’s father and his son’s truck out of her mind. So she did what writers do, and turned the words of that grieving father into a song. With the help of two co-writers, the finished product found its way to singer Lee Brice, who recorded the song called, aptly, “I Drive Your Truck.”

Last month, the song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.

Sergeant Jared Monti (www.army.mil)

These are the sort of people that we remember on Memorial Day. As they say, some gave all. Perhaps some managed to come home alive - but they put in some serious time and sacrifice, and deserve our attention and thanks, especially on this weekend. So, if you read this and are a veteran, I thank you for your service and sacrifice. Would that I could do more, and that our country would do more.

H/T Ace of Spades