Fireworks, family fun and community spirit

It is coming up; the kids will love it and dogs hate it. Fireworks that is, and the excuse is Independence Day or, as most call it, the 4th of July. Most of the surrounding small towns will have a celebration one way or another and McCook is planning a big family event also. Choices.

Our McCook Community-minded Christian Church is the event planner for the Wednesday 3rd of July 2024 event, which they call the “Southwest Nebraska Freedom Festival.” They tout inflatables for the kids, games and food trucks from 6-9pm. All done at the fairgrounds including live music with SwitchBak. Food trucks are always an adventure, but the big show is the 9-10 pm fireworks after dark. This old guy loves the big fireworks displays, especially the booms that echo into the night.

Maybe I’m still a kid at heart but for me the big attraction for this holiday is the fireworks for kids. Small firecrackers, sparklers, snakes, little cardboard replicas of tanks with canons that shoot sparks, and, of course, Roman candles. Yeah, I know the safe way to go is to stick them in the ground before lighting the fuse, but it's much more fun to hold them to shoot up and away. Maybe this old grandpa isn’t a really good influence.

Check out the last Friday’s edition of the Gazette for the all-day celebration of our neighbor Culbertson on Independence Day. The big attraction for your old columnist is the parade in which my Model T has participated for years. Being a farm community, there are also tractors, some of which will be older than me! Food, breakfast and lunch and those roosians are good cooks. Duck races and people races too. Friendly people and good times.

Independence Day fosters memories of our forebearers and the war that gained their separation and independence from the English government. Your author has no direct memory of any of the wars that followed until WWII. During that conflict I knew none of the battles directly but do remember as a young kid playing among the German POWs that worked in our neighborhood. Korea I missed but do remember meeting Bob Roth a high school associate of one of my sisters. Bob unfortunately died in action there so far away from home.

Then comes Vietnam and it was my turn to meet war firsthand. Being an air refueling tanker pilot probably shouldn’t really count because we were confined to flying in safe areas above and away from the real action. It was especially interesting flying at night over the jungles of South Vietnam because of the sparkling lights thousands of feet below where our brothers in arms were defending their remote outposts. Flashes of light when artillery shells or dropped bombs exploded. Remote outposts were often illuminated by brilliant flares suspended on parachutes that seemed to burn for hours. We watched an Arc Light one night as a formation of B-52’s dropped their strings of eighty plus bombs, a bright series of explosions zipping along at 500 miles an hour down below. In daytime about all we’d see was “willy pete” which was white phosphorus artillery shells leaving their puffs of distinctive brilliant white clouds. Fires from napalm were visible day and night. All quiet at our altitude but many times we could follow the action on our radios.

I still remember flying an approach to land, daytime, into our airbase called UTapao in southern Thailand. We were a bit below 1000 feet high when in a structure below us we spotted a myriad of flashes that looked like gunfire coming our way. We reported it to intelligence after landing and were informed that it was religious monks in their compound below lighting off harmless fireworks in celebration of something or other. Obviously, no hits on our airframe just a celebration like 4th of July back home.

Speaking of fireworks, I found it interesting in the culture of the Far East that funeral processions many times walked and fired a lot of fireworks on the march to the grave. The explanation that I received was that they were driving the evil spirits away from the deceased soul. Not our practice but probably comforting to them.

Being an old guy, yet a kid at heart, I love the big community fireworks displays. Remembering back to the year’s fireworks display when first stationed in Northern Michigan happened on a brilliantly clear night. The big displays went off with a nice display of northern lights above. Checking our expected Thursday night weather the forecast looks like we will be dominated with high pressure so no clouds and light breezes. Probably no northern lights either. Then the second year in Michigan the clouds and fog rolled in so when the big fireworks bombshells went up we’d see a glowing flash before the boom but no sparkles or shooting stars. Kind of anticlimactic but such is life. Take the good with the not-so-good.

So, Independence Day, here we come. We will celebrate in the traditions we enjoy and probably not think much about the war that gave us our freedom to celebrate. Just remember, though, that “We are the land of the free because of the brave”!

That is the way that I saw it.

Dick Trail