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Eulogy for Those That Served

© John Lovett

This is a portion of Pat Conroy's eulogy to his father, Col. Don Conroy, otherwise known as "The Great Santini." This document struck a nerve with me, being as I'm a veteran and the son of a WWII veteran.

As a writer, one of the things I try to do in my stories is to reach in and touch the heart. Because of my nature, I don't "wear my heart on my sleeve." However, I feel very deeply about veterans and their service and try to reflect that feeling in my stories.

My father served seven years in the U.S. Army, from 1938 to 1945. He was 16 when he got his mother to lie about his age. His family were poor farmers from Missouri and his father had died as a result of an accident in 1930. He enlisted so that his mother would have one less mouth to feed. All six of his brothers fought in either WWI or WWII. They all came home. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he was the only child out of a family of nine children that attended college.

After WWII, he worked for over 30 years in the aerospace industry. He attended to the birth of the earliest space craft and saw to the growth of the space industry. He truly loved those big "birds" he put into space. The house was always filled with pictures of the various space programs he was working on.

Like Pat Conroy, I grew up with my father and his brothers talking about their varied wartime experiences. But what has this to do with the movie industry, you ask? Simply put, it is our experiences that make us who we are. Everything I do, from writing a script to helping a director, I do based on the collective experience of these men and women.

Thanks, Dad.

COLONEL DON CONROY'S EULOGY by Pat Conroy - his son

The children of fighter pilots tell different stories than other kids do. None of our fathers can write a will or sell a life insurance policy or fill out a prescription or administer a flu shot or explain what a poet meant. We tell of fathers who land on aircraft carriers at pitch-black night with the wind howling out of the China Sea.

Our fathers wiped out aircraft batteries in the Philippines and set Japanese soldiers on fire when they made the mistake of trying to overwhelm our troops on the ground.

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