Photo by:1st Sense photography
Location: Spring Grove Illinois
As Memorial day 2018 Fast Approaches and we sit and Barbecue, we tend to forget those who served our country. We sit with our families at Parades honoring those who fell, and our children chase after candy. Yet after we go home and start the festivities of fishing, camping, and cooking on the grill. We never attend what happens after the parade. Usually every parade ends at a cemetery, and eulogies and a roll call for those lost in the many wars fought for this country are given. Flags adorn the graves of those lives lost and those who served but have since passed from this world. The Photo above I found this marker in a local cemetery in Spring Grove, Illinois. It made me think about who this man was, what he saw, the fact it was not a mechanized war but many men still lost their lives. I think we tend to forget the smaller wars, because our education mainly hit on wars such as the Revolutionary war, The Civil War, World War 1 and 2. The Smaller wars get buried in books somewhere, Wars such as the War of 1812, The Mexican-American war, The Blackhawk war etc… We forget that men no matter where they were from defended their countries and beliefs.
Photo by: 1st Sense Photography
Location: Woodstock, Illinois
Here I was strolling taking photos during a memorial day parade my sons youth football team had been in. This is a sight I will never, ever forget, a memory emblazoned in my mind forever. The soldier stood guard against a pole with his sons, and daughter wearing shirts that said welcome home Daddy. I was Choked up and decided to pick up the camera. Whether or not they knew it they created a moment. these children probably watched their dad go off to war not knowing the consequences of war, and that their dad may never return home. Yet he did unlike many others before him. I guess in a way this was my way of thanking him for defending our freedom from terrorism.
Photo by: 1st Sense Photography
Location: Woodstock, Illinois
At the end of the Parade a new flag upon the square dedicated to those who served the flag is replaced every year by those who served. Boots, Dogtags and a Rifle with the helmet of a fallen soldier stood in front of me. The soldiers lowered the flag and stood at attention as a new one replaced it. I really wish I would have looked at the dog tags that adorned the memorial for the fallen. We forget as we live our everyday lives, these soldiers go out fight and die for the freedom we take for granted. We may be watching a ballgame at home, or fishing. While men fall we forget about them, and think our lives are a given.
Photo by: 1st Sense Photography
Location: Tuscola, Illinois
a few years later I moved to a town called Atwood, Illinois. But before my ex and I moved there, she used to live in a tiny little town about half an hour away from Champaign, Illinois called Tuscola, Illinois. As I strolled the streets of Tuscola taking photos, I ran across this spray painted on a road for a fallen soldier. I actually was seeing this person meant something to someone. Sgt. Flynn Schultz was someones family, and friend I never knew the family, but I found this moving because it made you realize someone made this because he meant something to the people he knew and the people who lived in that tiny town. This may not have been how he wanted to be remembered as spray paint on a road in the middle of nowhere, but it was how someone made him remembered for a very long time to come. So when people walked past people would see his name and maybe take a second to pay their respects to a fallen soldier.
Hopefully this Memorial day before you go to parades, camp, go parties or whatever it is you may do, you will take the time out to remember those who died for your freedoms. If it is a moment of silence, or a prayer or writing maybe a memorial to someone you knew served and died for our country. Just all I ask is you REMEMBER!!!!
1st Sense Photography 