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Early Saturday, before the burgers and sparklers, a few hundred people gathered in a field on the edge of Lake Norman, waiting for an eagle to fly.
The bird's release was hosted by the Carolina Raptor Center, which had nursed the bald eagle from an injury to its starring July 4 role. The ceremony was held at McGuire Nuclear Station, where early risers sipped coffee and ate pastries and talked about what this event, and this holiday, meant.
“It's an honor to America – but also an honor to the military,” said Steve Kennedy of Charlotte, in his Air Force dress blues. Kennedy, with the 440th Security Forces reserve unit at Pope Air Force Base, has served for 24 years, long enough to see the public's perception of the military rise and fall. “Right now, it's at a high,” he said.
His son Eric was deployed to Afghanistan last year with the Air Force National Guard and returned this year. Eric began serving shortly after 9-11. “That was when everyone kind of came together,” he says, and Independence Days since have largely been like this one – a celebration of freedom, an appreciation of those fighting for it.
Some, however, remembered when that wasn't so.
John Woods was just shy of his 17th birthday when his 25-year-old brother was killed in Vietnam. He remembers clearly the February day 43 years ago when the phone rang, the telegraph arrived, the officers knocked on the door. Five years later, Woods was in the Army, volunteering for the same difficult duty of notifying families, because he understood what they were about to feel.
Now, he thinks of his brother every day, of course, and he knows those families share his fear that people will forget the soldiers who died in controversial conflicts. “People don't want to talk about war,” he said Saturday, “and they don't want to talk about unpopular events in our history.”
This week, Woods, now mayor of Davidson, trained with the Raptor Center for his duty Saturday of releasing the bald eagle, named Liberty.
Woods was taught to cradle Liberty – “almost like a baby,” he said – yet hold onto it as firmly as he could.
“It does me good to do this,” he said.
And so, he waited Saturday morning for the military colors to be posted, and for the Pledge of Allegiance and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and for the speeches. “I ask that you reflect upon the meaning here,” said Col. Charles Dunn of Pope Air Force Base, before the crowd moved to the edge of the water.
There, Woods held Liberty and flung her into the air, and the bird began flapping – not over the lake as planned, but back above the crowd, because it could soar wherever it chose, free.
