In the midst of real greatness

I was in the midst of greatness last month. There is no question about that.

Sports writing pays my bills and over the years I have been in venues ranging from quirky old high school gyms to locker rooms in the National Football League and Major League Baseball.

I have talked with the latest hot shot high school player all the way up to Hall of Famers.

I've even gotten some chances to interview entertainers, politicians and business people. I've talked with those content to make a name locally and those who are known around the world.

But real greatness hit me back on Oct. 5.

“No, you are our guest. We wouldn't have it any other way,” Paul Ryan said as I offered to pay for my meal.

To me, Mr. Ryan is THE Paul Ryan. The guy who ran for Vice-President in 2012? I like him. But he's just a member of Congress.

Col. Paul Ryan and my mother.

The Paul Ryan I know personally is Col. Ryan to me. He had traveled from his home in western Kentucky to join a group of veterans and their families for the annual gathering of retirees from the United States Property and Fiscal Office of the Kentucky National Guard.

It's a part of the state headquarters in Frankfort and is where my father spent most of his 35-year career serving our country. Col. Ryan was younger than my father but was his commanding officer for much of his career.

When I took my mom to the reunion, I knew only a handful of the people there. However, I recognized Col. Ryan immediately. His hair was much grayer than the last time I had seen him but otherwise, he hadn't changed a bit.

He was wearing a Kentucky Wildcat sweatshirt, which caused me to remember how he talked with me about my heroes, Louie Dampier, Dan Issel and other Wildcats, when I would visit my dad's office.

“Your father was a good man,” Col. Ryan said of my dad, CW4 Allen Herndon, who died in 1985. Col. Ryan was one of his pall bearers.

“We had a lot of good people here.”

Indeed. I never really knew what my father did. He never said much about his job. I just knew he was proud of what he did – he was a full-time member of the Guard – and that he would miss church one Sunday a month to take part in what we referred to as “drill.”

And I remembered he was gone a lot when riots broke out in Louisville in the late 1960s and again on the University of Kentucky campus following the Kent State shootings in 1970. “There were times when it was just your father and me here at state headquarters,” Col. Ryan remembered.

It wasn't the kind of military job that would have prompted a John Wayne movie, but the older I get, the more I realize how important it was too.
Several years ago, I read “The Sons of Bardstown” by Jim Wilson. It tells how Bardstown, Ky., in the next county over from where I live and grew up, was affected by the Vietnam War. The Amazon preview says, “This is a moving, superbly reported profile of one small Kentucky town and the disproportionately high number of young men it sacrificed to the American cause in Vietnam, including five as the result of a single, brief, militarily meaningless battle.”

My father made that 'militarily meaningless battle' mean something to a young person grappling with how he viewed a world shaped by that war. I was only 10 years old when members of a Bardstown-based National Guard unit were overrun by the Viet Cong and five lost their lives. Yet I still remember my dad talking about that night.

“Oh, yes, we knew some of those guys,” Col. Ryan told me. “We were sending things to that unit all the time.”

Col. Ryan explained how the system worked and how people my father knew gave the ultimate sacrifice.

But there was one thing neither Col. Ryan or anyone else in that meeting of greatness had to explain that day: Their service was, and is, important.

And they are proud of that service.

They should be.

Thanks, dad. Thanks, Col. Ryan.

And thanks to all who have personified what real greatness is.