Kenneth Roger Smith

21 Gun Salute

In my efforts to give voice to my heretofore incomplete silence,
I speak, now, to you, my dear audience, in the voice of a

21 Gun Salute to a soldier,

my friend, my buddy, my compadre

1.

Make no mistake about it, he was the sweetest man I ever knew.

2.

(4 count)

The Washington Redskins was his favorite football team.

3.

(4 count)

And oh those Atlanta Braves disappointed him again this year.

4.

(4 count)

Silently he spoke about many things, things that can not be verbalized.

5.

(4 count)

He wrote a story called "The Paul Jensen Story." "The Paul Jensen Story"
was his story. The last line of "The Paul Jensen Story" reads:

"There are times when what we need most is one good friend."

6.

(4 count)

He was my friend, he was the one good friend to many.

7.

(4 count)

His students loved him. He was a good teacher. They loved him
because he did not lie to them. He was an honest man. He saw good
where many can not.

8.

(4 count)

In Vietnam he flew rescue helicopters. At one time he was a bartender.
a ranch hand, crime beat reporter, and he worked in a copper mine.

9.

(4 count)

He called his mother BB. He was a mama's boy.
Mama BB cooked the best trout I've ever tasted. His father taught him
to be a carpenter, but he never learned.
Some say, "You can not teach a writer a new trick."

10.

(4 count)

When he was a boy, he rode a horse from house to house on
Halloween night.
Trick or treat, he rode tall in his own saddle.

11.

(4 count)

He was a desert boy. He moved here but he left his heart,
left his heart
in Arizona. He loved the texture of hot, dry sand.

12.

(4 count)

He loved the music of Chuck Berry and the beat
of his own drum.

13.

(4 count)

His favorite movie was a baseball movie. A movie called "The Natural,"
a movie starring Robert Redford, the Sundance Kid.

14.

(4 count)

He played 2nd base on his high school baseball team.
And he pitched when they asked him to pitch.

15.

(4 count)

He loved camping out and catching a trap full of crabs, but mostly
he loved the sound of a big trout on the line,
the one that did not get away.

16.

(4 count)

A Navy man, he earned and he wore war medals, but
he was the medal of his own honor.

17.

(4 count)

He often wore an orange baseball cap with "Buck Snort, Tennessee"
stamped across the front, BOLD.

18.

(4 count)

He was born in the small town of Silver City, New Mexico,
an hour and a half from Chihuahua, Mexico.

19.

(4 count)

He was a cowboy but not a Dallas Cowboy. He was a regular cowboy,
and he wore regular cowboy boots.

20.

(4 count)

He was a story teller, he told stories, stories that many count among the best.
My favorite is a story called "Pending Notification."

21.

(4 count)

No doubt, no question about it, he was the sweetest man I ever knew.


(8 count)


22.

(4 count)

It was James Baldwin who said, "The world is held together by the love
of a few people, a very few people.

Kenneth Roger Smith was one of a very few.

Thank you buddy for sharing with all of us the definition of the word
LOVE.



Sincerely
Earl S. Braggs