“There wasn’t a thought to not going. Everyone went. That’s how it was.”

The world is a very different place than that morning many years ago. My dad at 17 years of age sat dressed waiting on his bed. Long before sunrise his father came in and said, “Son, you are very fortunate to be able to go in the Army and serve your country.”

dad In downtown Orlando, my dad was to get on a bus bound for Camp Wheeler in Macon. After basic training, he was to board a ship headed to Livorno, Italy.

He didn’t think it was such a swell arrangement. There weren’t fingernail marks left on the door jamb, but he admitted fear of the unknown. In spite of that, “There wasn’t a thought to not going. Everyone went. That’s how it was.”

My grandfather was a physician. Earlier in the war, he was accepted in at the rank of Major only to be turned away because of a heart condition. My grandfather lived 96 years. So much for the heart condition, but there wasn’t any measure of insincerity in his admonition wishing he could serve.

At the bus station a well-known judge handed my father a bible. He left him with these words, “Men who probably don’t know as much as you are going to be telling you what to do. I suggest you do it.”

Just do what you are told and go serve your country. So he left on that boat, not knowing what waited in Tuscany. He and all those boys sailed into a world where sonar and radar where still in their infancy. There was no notion of nuclear armaments or the internet.

When they arrived in Italy, “It was in ruins.”

The morning we talked last week, he spoke of his discouragement with how divided the country seems. “Back then we were unified. We all pulled together.”

Later that day, I was traveling with my children through downtown Orlando. Suddenly, the main thoroughfares were flooded with police sirens. Ten minutes later emerging from a store after buying two fishing poles for two bored children, I stopped to tweet. “Just made first impulse Christmas purchase.” (For hubby.)

Scanning down the last few Twitter messages, I noticed one from a well-known tweeter, an expatriate writer living in the hills of Tuscany. “BREAKING NEWS – shooting rampage in Orlando high-rise.” I tweeted back that unfortunately all those sirens I just heard made sense. Trying to hear radio reports on local news, there was nothing. Traffic stalled; ambulances passed. I tweeted this to my Italian friend who began re-tweeting my messages. My pedestrian observations of breaking news event (in 140 words or less) being sent worldwide.

Shooters turn on Fort Hood and metropolitan office buildings. Instantaneous communication around the world. I learned of a breaking new event happening less than three miles away from where I sat in my car — via a woman in front of her computer overlooking the Tuscan hills. The world is a very different place.

United we stand, divided we fall. Or has the phrase become, united we stand divided?

Thank you to all who serve and have served this country. For an interview with Madisonian Paul Reid and his WWII remembrances, visit my blog www.jamiemiles.com/blog.