The Diary of a Leader on Memorial Day Monday

July 4th 2016.

My twin sister, Anna, our friend, Sabrina, and I walked from my house over to the July 4th Huntington Beach parade.

Emotions welled up inside me as we watched the part of the parade where the World War 2 veterans passed by. Two months earlier my grandfather had passed away and the reality that the greatest generation was becoming less and less part of our current generation was a frequent diary entry of mine.

About twenty minutes into the parade, I saw a caravan of World War 2 veterans in an army truck coming down the street filled with veterans waving. There were only a handful willing and able to walk beside the truck.

As they got closer my attention stayed on one of them; an older veteran with the largest smile on his face and a spring in his step.

To everyone's shock as he began to pass right in front of us, he seemed to lose his balance moving forward and took about five big steps trying to catch his balance. Unfortunately, he couldn't get his feet back underneath him and took a hard fall.

I noticed he only had one full arm, the other stopped right at the elbow, and was unable to brace his fall. His head took a portion of the impact.

As all good Huntington Beach locals do: they rally. About 5 nearby hosts grabbed their ice bags and ran over.

Before they could help him, his fellow veterans had already picked him up and as they checked him out I noticed his smile hadn't faltered one bit. They helped him up into the army truck and he continued waving out the window, a huge smile on his face and an ice pack over his eyebrow.

The rest of the day, Anna, Sabrina and I tried to get into the July 4th volleyball, food and fireworks, but were unable to get that incident out of our mind. We were standing right there. We could have jumped over the teenagers sitting in front of us and caught him. We kept going over what we could have done; like we could go back in time and catch him.

At around 4:00pm, my front yard full of hamburgers and sandy volleyballers, I walked inside and found Anna and Sabrina teary eyed still pondering the morning incident.

In the midst of trying to cope with our own feelings, we decided to do something about it. With the help of Google, and what I believe to be a sweet miracle search by God, we found him. He lived 2 miles away from me in Huntington Beach.

Anna and Sabrina had a flight the next morning. So we decided to get up early the next morning and make an attempt to go meet this veteran.

At minimum we could tell him thank you for his service and shake his hand.

The first hurdle: he lived in a gated community. This is where the second miracle came into play. The gate guard heard our story, knew who we were trying to meet and for some reason, allowed three self-identified strangers drive right into the gated community.

As we pulled up to his house, the nerves and hesitation started building up.

Fortunately, we parked and walked up to his front gate and rang the bell. Sticking to the game plan.

A housekeeper opened the door and asked us if there was anything we needed.

We had no idea how to phrase our request so we just answered honestly.

She went back inside and closed the door.

A few minutes later, the door opened and we saw the big smile and bright eyes peeking out from beneath a heavy head bandage.

He walked over to us, extended his hand, looked us directly in the eyes and said "I'm Harold."

I'll never forget that moment.

Or the moments that followed.

We asked him if he could tell us more of his story.

He said he'd be happy to and invited us inside.

As we walked into his office, we saw a Purple Heart medal framed on the wall.

For the next hour he told his story of the mission where he lost his arm. It was near the end of the war and his unit was tasked to go release a prisoner of war camp. On the way, they undertook fire and most of his unit was killed. He found himself in a ditch with his arm badly injured and described having to use his belt as a tourniquet. He showed us footage from film he had taken during that time.

To give you a better picture of Harold's personality, the phone rang and it sounded like it was his doctor calling to check in. His response to the first question: "How am I doing? . . . Well, compared to who?"

On top of his heroics during the war he went on to live a full life.

He shared his faith with us, his career, his family and his still increasing number of skydiving jumps.

But the conversation always returned back to the men in his unit who died while serving.

He shared about where they were from, what their personalities were like, the nicknames they gave each other, the pranks they played on one another.

The most beautiful aspect that I picked up on was the essence that he believed the only reason he was still alive was because of their sacrifice.

So, on this Memorial Day Monday, I'm thinking about the sacrifice of all the U.S. military personnel who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

And the gift of time I had hearing some of their stories directly from the greatest generation.