It’s a day Paul Monti would always remember. The day he bought the information navy mother and father dread: His 30-year-old son Jared was killed within the line of obligation in Afghanistan. Paul immediately joined the ranks of a membership nobody chooses to be a component: he was a Gold Star dad or mum.
Paul didn’t know what to do or say when he bought the information, or find out how to course of his grief. A number of months later, on his first Veterans Day go to to his son’s gravesite on the Massachusetts Nationwide Cemetery, he seen one thing unusual: There wasn’t a flag on show close to any of the 78,000 graves within the cemetery. Not one.
The flags weren’t there as a result of the cemetery floor crews complained the flags made it too onerous to chop the cemetery’s grass. Paul, upon listening to that information, did what any Gold Star dad or mum would do: He fought the Division of Veterans Affairs till the rule was modified.
However this Gold Star dad’s mission had simply begun. He launched Operation Flags for Vets, a corporation devoted to inserting flags on each grave on the Massachusetts Nationwide Cemetery on Memorial and Veterans Day. Through the group’s first ceremony on Memorial Day of 2011, a military of volunteers adorned 62,000 graves with flags.
Paul was interviewed later that day on the nationwide radio present “Here and Now,” preventing again tears as he advised tales about his deceased son, together with one a few new kitchen set Jared and his Fort Bragg Military friends bought for his or her residence, solely to offer it away.
“One day his buddies came home and the kitchen set was missing,” Paul recalled. “They asked him where it was, and Jared said, ‘Well, I was over at one of my soldier’s houses and his kids were eatin’ on the floor, so I figured they needed the kitchen set more than we did.’ And so the $700 kitchen set disappeared. That’s what he did.”
His son was a person who didn’t crave consideration. “All of his medals went in a sock drawer,” Paul mentioned. “No one ever saw them; he didn’t want to stand out.” In 2009, Jared posthumously acquired the best commendation an American soldier might be awarded: the Congressional Medal of Honor.
However essentially the most highly effective a part of Paul’s story revolved round his son’s truck. Why he didn’t promote it. And why he nonetheless drove it. “What can I tell you? It’s him,” he defined. “It’s got his DNA all over it. I love driving it because it reminds me of him, though I don’t need the truck to remind me of him. I think about him every hour of every day.”
Paul shared particulars of his son’s Dodge 4×4 Ram 1500 truck adorned with decals, together with the tenth Mountain Division, an American flag and a “Go Army” decal.
Then got here essentially the most emotional a part of the interview. “When you lose your child you’ve lost your future,” he lamented. “And I think that’s why so many Gold Star parents drive their children’s trucks. Because they have to hold on.”
I’ll always remember that interview as a result of I used to be listening to it on a sunny Memorial Day again in 2011 in a Walmart parking zone in my hometown, unable to get out of my SUV as a result of I used to be crying. Crying like I used to cry once I was a toddler. Crying as if I’d simply misplaced my youngster.
I wasn’t the one one sitting alone in my automotive crying that Memorial Day. Nashville songwriter Connie Harrington was in her automotive listening to the story, too. Moved to tears, she did what writers do: She pulled over and scribbled down particulars of the story so she wouldn’t overlook them.
When she bought residence, one a part of Paul’s story stored tugging at her: the story of that truck. With the assistance of two songwriter pals (Jimmy Yeary and Jessi Alexander), Harrington turned Monti’s story—and all that emotion—right into a music. Not lengthy after, nation singer Lee Brice recorded it, and “I Drive Your Truck” made its manner shortly to No. 1 on Billboard‘s nation chart. The official video has since been considered 55 million occasions.
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However the story didn’t finish there. Not lengthy after the music grew to become successful, Paul was contacted by a lady he knew who’d misplaced her son in the identical battle that took his son’s life. “She sent me a message that she’d heard the song and that I had to listen to it,” Paul mentioned. “She knew I drove Jared’s truck, and she drove her son’s truck, too.”
He was unable to make it by way of the music. “I’d get into it a few bars or so and kind of welled up,” he defined.
What Paul didn’t know was that it was his story that impressed the music. The writers ultimately tracked him all the way down to rejoice the music’s success. It gained the Nation Music Affiliation’s Track of the 12 months in 2013.
The music did what nation music does greatest: inform unhappy, lovely tales. Right here’s the opening verse and refrain:
Eighty-nine cents within the ashtray
Half-empty bottle of Gatorade
Rollin’ on the floorboard.That soiled Braves cap on the sprint
Canine tags hangin’ from the rearview
Outdated Skoal can and cowboy boots
And a “Go Army” shirt folded within the again.This factor burns fuel like loopy
However that’s all proper
Folks bought their methods of copin’
Oh and I’ve bought mine.I drive your truck
I roll each window down
And I expend
Each again street on this city.I discover a area, I tear it up
Until all of the ache is a cloud of mud
Sure, typically I drive your truck.
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What we don’t study from the music have been the circumstances of Jared’s dying. On June 21, 2006 Sergeant First Class Monti was main a 16-man patrol within the Nuristan Province—a part of the tenth Mountain Division—when his patrol was ambushed by enemy fighters. One soldier who served beneath him was wounded badly. Regardless of a depraved firefight, Jared tried 3 times to assist his fallen comrade. The threerd try bought him killed.
Nobody who knew Jared was shocked. “It’s what he did,” Paul mentioned of his son. “Jared didn’t give up on people, and always, he tried to do the right thing.”
What led Jared to grow to be the person he was? One needn’t look far to determine it out. His father had the identical ardour for serving others, for doing the fitting factor—and doing onerous issues.
In 2022, Paul died on the age of 76 from most cancers. He taught earth sciences at a neighborhood highschool for 35 years and barely talked about himself: He was too busy taking good care of folks round him.
Paul’s daughter Niccole advised reporters her dad, one in every of 9 youngsters rising up, labored onerous all through his life. He delivered newspapers and labored every kind of wierd jobs rising up, working two and three jobs to help his household. He didn’t complain about it. Or take credit score for it. It was who he was.
“Paul relentlessly pursued a life of helping others, always leading by example,” his colleagues wrote on the Massachusetts Fallen Heroes Fb web page. “He left us to join his son Jared in heaven.”
It’s a chic last picture of two lives superbly lived, and God’s simply reward for doing so. It’s why the story of Paul and Jared Monti is one for the ages, memorialized by a music for the ages.
A music everybody ought to take heed to this—and each—Memorial Day.
Syndicated with permission from The Each day Sign.
