American Spirit

by Taya Kyle

  Jesse’s show helped make blue-collar skills “cool.” He still treasures a letter he got from a teenage girl who wrote that she used to “look down on” her father until she saw the show. Then she realized that he did the same thing Jesse James did.

  Molding a piece of metal is not the same as molding a person. Whether an impressionable teenager, a desperate father trying to shelter his newborn, an addict who refuses to clean up and come off the streets—people are made of far more complicated ores than iron. Reaching them takes time and effort—but nothing says it can’t begin with a sandwich left on a windowsill.

  Summer Song

  Zac Brown and Camp Southern Ground

  Kids are the products of their surroundings as well as their genes. If they spend their days going from home to school and school to home, how will they expand their horizons?

  Not by playing video games or fooling with the latest app on their phones. Real growth comes from actual interaction with physical things, be it nature or another human being.

  Where’s that going to happen?

  Summer camp—especially if it’s Camp Southern Ground in Georgia.

  Kids from seven to seventeen spend a week at the camp, hiking, swimming, doing arts and crafts—pretty much everything you’d find at a typical summer camp. One of the things that makes it a bit unique, however, is that the camp attempts to be inclusive, integrating children with conditions like autism into the camp population. The camp also actively recruits children of service members as a way of paying the families back for their service. The camp also offers retreats and programs for military families separate from the summer camp. We liked that idea so much that our foundation, Chris Kyle Frog Foundation, became one of the sponsors. We’re excited to be hosting programs there.

  The camp is the brainchild of musician Zac Brown, the leader of the popular country music group the Zac Brown Band.

  Whether you are into country music or not, you should know that the Zac Brown Band is big time. At last call, the band had placed thirteen #1 singles on the country charts and taken home enough platinum to make an entire beach of blondes jealous. They have three Grammys, and I’m sure more are on the way. “Chicken Fried” is probably the standard introduction to the band’s music for myriad reasons; check out one of Jim’s favorites, “I’ll Be Your Man (Song for a Daughter)” for a deeper listen. And their concerts, with amazing musicians and often collaborations from other artists, are eclectic, artistic, entertaining, and some of the best you will ever see.

  Zac would be the first to tell you that Camp Southern Ground, which hosted its first summer campers in 2017, depends on an entire team of people. That’s true enough, but he was its driving force and vision. More than that, it reflects his values and own experiences.

  He first went to camp as a seven-year-old, where he came to view the counselors as role models and even kinder, gentler superheroes. His experience at Camp Michael, from roughly ages nine to fifteen, was “transformative” in several ways, including musically: while there, he saw a fellow camper flat-picking a guitar and realized there was more he could do with the instrument than he’d thought. The experience may or may not have set him on a musical course—he was taking classical lessons already, and his older brother played—but it’s still a memory that he returns to after all these years of touring and top albums.

  “I went to a camp with kids who had autism and Down syndrome,” he explains. “I learned to celebrate differences. We saw the strength that other kids had, and that inspired me.”

  On my first visit, I was blown away by the serenity of the place. It’s not all that far from Atlanta, but in many ways it’s a world apart. The camp aims at being self-sustaining; campers grow their own healthy food. The architecture is tuned to the environment and the kids—a treehouse that looks like a spaceship serves as a conference room. A planned technology center looks like something you’d find in a science lab.

  I didn’t go on the rope course—but I will on my next visit. Challenging yourself physically to do something you’ve never done before is a great way to prepare yourself to do something emotionally you’ve never done before.

  Of course, now that I’ve said that in print, I have no out.

  Summer camps can provide new experiences, new friends. They can also be a place to gain acceptance as an individual. A performer-to-be might go on stage there for the first time and get encouragement; a child with autism might learn that he can interact without being ridiculed.

  But Zac’s ideas and hopes for Camp Southern Ground go beyond the week campers might spend there. He’s hoping that it can show the way to better, more stimulating ways of educating our kids. The people who help shape programs there are working on different ways of helping children “out of darkness.” Nutrition, physical activities, art—it’s a mix of different things and different ways not just of reaching kids, but of encouraging and helping them to break past whatever shadows their true selves and potential.

  This isn’t limited to kids who have been diagnosed with some sort of disorder or physical limitation. All of us have something that limits us or makes us square pegs in round holes at different times. Zac talks about how he was always failing something or getting into trouble as a young child; nowadays, he would be diagnosed with some form of attention deficit disorder and probably given medication. But the real problem wasn’t his body chemistry; it was the system that tried to impose six to eight hours of desk-sitting on that chemistry. Teachers and the system they were stuck in didn’t know quite how to deal with him. He hopes to change that, long term.

  “The problem in America is everybody’s thinking about what’s going to affect them in five years and how they can make money off that,” he notes. “Instead of in twenty years, America should be a leader of education in the world. We’re number thirty-five right now. We should be ashamed of ourselves.”

  Putting children with different physical and mental capabilities together seems to me an important step in opening young minds. Doing that opens up our future, making it something more cooperative, closer to our society’s real potential. And it takes a team, not just at a summer camp or a single school. As Zac told me one day when we were talking about the camp, it’s hard to accomplish big things on your own; working with somebody, or a lot of somebodies, puts some fire behind you.

  Reading about celebrities and superstars, some will be tempted to think, well, they can do that because they are famous . . . rich . . . whatever. And of course there’ll be haters as well—criticism is epidemic these days.

  But to quote Zac, “If you do something, you’ll be sure to be met with resistance. That’s OK. Keep going until you find others who believe in you.

  “Make a difference in whatever way you can. Everybody is an ordinary person. I’m an ordinary person. The important part is that you can do something extraordinary.”

  Junking for Joy

  Amie and Jolie Sikes

  Maybe you saw their television show on HGTV. Maybe you sought them out after seeing the bus they decorated for country singer Miranda Lambert. Maybe you found their treasures in Pottery Barn stores and catalogs, or followed their entertaining mix on Instagram, or happened into their store in Round Top, Texas (population: 90). Or maybe you are one of the thousands who swell Round Top’s population during the biannual antiques fairs and partake in the sisters’ Prom.

  However you meet the Junk Gypsies—Amie Sikes and her sister Jolie—you will immediately be impressed by their humor and kind hearts as well as their knack for picking gems out of the trash.

  The two sisters have raised “junking”—recycling junked items—into an art form and a growing sensation. They sum up their philosophy as “We believe every man’s trash is truly our treasure, junking is a way of life, and garage sales are our Rodeo Drive.”

  TV stints aside, their main business is selling antique and antique-inspired treasures that dress up minds as well as homes or bodies. Their eclectic style combines roots with whimsey, oft
en with a Texan slant; it’s a look that inspires hugs and grins. As they put it, they set out to create a store and instead found a lifestyle.

  They are doing literally what I feel we all should do metaphorically—making beauty out of the junk of life. And they do it with flair and fun.

  Three of my friends bought me my “She Who Is Brave Boots”—Junk Gypsy creations. They’re my favorite boots, not just because they’re comfortable—that is important!—but because they incorporate phoenix designs. The phoenix is a symbol of rebirth, new life rising from the ashes. Every time I put them on, I feel ready to become a new person.

  But there is more to life than decorating or television shows. When Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area in 2017, the two sisters felt they had to do something to help their neighbors. Their home is some eighty miles west of Houston, and while the storm did considerable damage there, it wasn’t hit nearly as bad as the coast.

  “I felt a huge guilt,” confesses Amie, “that we weren’t there to help.”

  There were personal connections to the disaster; relatives and friends were hit hard. One cousin sent a picture showing their entire first floor flooded—they’d taken shelter upstairs, fortunately, but were stranded until the water went down.

  Seeing these and other pictures of the devastation, the Junk Gypsies decided to launch a fund-raising effort, designing and marketing T-shirts they sold online. Working with their friends Miranda Lambert and Marcus Luttrell (Lone Survivor, Team Never Quit) and his wife, Melanie, they designed a special T-shirt with the logo “We are Texas—come hell or high water.” They raised $150,000 for flood victims and restoration, eating their own expenses on labor and other overhead.

  Once they had the orders, they had to produce. The sisters and their employees collected the tees from their manufacturer, then began packing. They were joined by local volunteers, including a man who had already bought a hundred shirts. The post office stayed open late to handle the bags the Gypsies kept bringing in as they rushed to get the shirts out quickly.

  I’m not surprised by that. Anyone who knows the sisters can tell that they are openhearted, generous people. If you make that connection, it’s hard not to be the same way yourself. Part of it may be like attracting like. Another part may be something like inspiration and leadership—leading by example is hard to beat.

  It’s the ripple effect in action.

  But why start? Why go through all that trouble for strangers?

  It’s not religion or church. Amie admits she goes to church sparingly, and if anything is turned off to religion. But she still feels a need to help others, not for God but for them and for herself.

  “I don’t feel like I have to do it,” says Amie. “But we just feel better if we do.”

  The sisters’ parents owned three small restaurants when they were growing up, but their lives were middle-class-comfortable rather than rich. They both worked in the family business at an early age and watched their parents habitually “comp” those too poor to pay. And like Jesse James, their grandmother was an important influence. She had a saying: “Cook enough for the family, and the stranger at the door.”

  At the end of the day, a lot of threads tie together in all of us to push us toward helping others. Empathy cannot be overrated. But neither can humility.

  “We’ve had a lot of success,” notes Amie. “Part of it was just hard-ass work, and a lot of it. But also part was luck.”

  That goes for all of us. Knowing that, how can we fail to help others whose luck has gone bad?

  Or as Amie says, “If we put a lot of love into the world, the world will love us back.”

  Seven

  Honor, Memory, and Angels

  Precious Resources

  As the wife of an active-duty SEAL, I learned a great deal about the sacrifices that service members and their families make. Chris often said that servicemen and -women sign a blank check to the USA for a price up to and including their lives, never knowing when or if it will be cashed. They do so willingly, understanding that service and sacrifice are the greatest forms of patriotism.

  Their families make similar sacrifices, but often without any say in the matter. A toddler doesn’t understand the word sacrifice, let alone the concept, yet he or she may have to sacrifice the love of a parent. Unless they’ve been through it themselves, few young wives or husbands truly understand what it’s like to uproot their own lives every year or two because their spouse has been reassigned. And there’s no way to explain to anyone why your stomach feels like an open sore every time a news report brings a rumor of war.

  As important as it is to honor the living for their contributions, we can’t forget those who have gone before. We’ve spoken a lot about the future in this book, about children and doing things to make their lives better. But our lives were improved as well. We stand on the backs and shoulders of many generations, pioneers, immigrants, overachievers. Laborers, workers, and, yes, the occasional no-good miscreant. Intentionally or not, their collective journeys made us better.

  Thinking of the past reminds us of the values that brought us here. When it comes to the history of our sailors and soldiers, remembering the past and preserving it for the future is a vital task.

  Which brings me to Lee Grimes and some other wonderful folk, past and present as well.

  Honor and Heal

  Veterans Memorial Museum

  Having been military himself, my husband, Chris, loved helping other servicemen after he got out of the Navy. And he loved to do it anonymously. Many of his friends have stories about how he’d see a sailor or soldier in line at a store or a restaurant and would arrange to surreptitiously pay for their coffee or whatever. Then he’d tell the cashier not to give him away while he made off; the beneficiary was left to wonder who to thank.

  On those occasions when he was found out, Chris would always tell the soldier or sailor to “pay it forward”—deliver some act of random kindness to someone else in the future.

  Paying it forward works like magic, creating a ripple effect of goodwill throughout our communities and the country in general. And we’re not talking big things, either—someone unexpectedly paying for your coffee profoundly changes your mood for the rest of the day and maybe the week. Yet the gesture doesn’t actually cost all that much. Even cheaper: letting someone go in front of you in traffic with a smile.

  Paying it forward.

  But sometimes to pay things forward, we have to look back. And that’s what Lee Grimes did out in Washington State.

  As a young man, Lee won an appointment to West Point, the Army’s prestigious college dedicated to training young officers. But circumstances kept Lee from joining the Army; he ended up becoming an accountant and then a carpenter in the area around Centralia and Chehalis, Washington, about an hour south of Tacoma if you’re obeying the speed limit; a little less if you don’t.

  Still somewhat interested in the military, Lee got involved in re-creating some famous battles and encounters in World War II. He was just finishing one at a July 4 celebration when a veteran came up to him and thanked him for being part of the production.

  It was important, said the veteran, to let people know what had happened in the past.

  “Nobody’s going to remember what we did,” lamented the man.

  Really?

  The more Lee thought about it, though, the more he realized the man might be right. While there are plenty of history books around with the basic facts, each man’s and woman’s war was different. Many World War II veterans had never bothered to tell even their families about what they went through, and thus their memories of the war would disappear when they died.

  Something, of course, that happens to us all, but was accelerating as these World War II soldiers aged.

  Lee bought himself a video camera and a VCR and went around town interviewing World War II veterans about their experiences. His library of interviews quickly grew.

  Occasionally, a veteran had to be coaxed into telling the
ir story. This was a time before YouTube and Snapchat and other social media venues. More critically, the veterans were from a generation that tended to look suspiciously at anything that might smack of bragging.

  And there were also men who’d had horrible experiences and didn’t want the old memories and horrors to resurface.

  Every story Lee collected is poignant in its own right, but among the most moving is the tale of a World War II POW tortured by the Japanese, who went on to serve in Korea after the war. Always tight-lipped about the experiences, he finally opened up for Lee at the urging of his family.

  But this isn’t a story about these veterans’ memories, all of which have been archived for posterity.

  Sometime after he started, veterans began giving Lee mementos of their service—jackets and uniforms, medals, diaries . . . all the physical things one might use to build a museum exhibit.

  Or fill a basement and an attic and the rest of a house . . .

  At some point, Lee and his wife realized that they had a lot of memorabilia and no place really to share it. As the story goes, one night he woke up with a message from God—make a museum.

  Lee and some friends held a meeting in December 1995 and established a board to create a museum. Shortly afterward, they got a nonprofit status and began looking for a building. They found it in a storefront on Main Street in Chehalis.

  Veterans Memorial Museum opened in 1997. Lee quit work to organize the museum and raise money. He also mortgaged his house to raise funds.

  There were 189 visitors that first year. Two years later, the museum was too small to handle all its visitors, let alone house and display its artifacts properly.

  The board decided to move down the road, finding a piece of property right off the highway.