Tim and I arrived in Nashville around noon last Wednesday and were greeted by Dave, another member of Sons & Daughters in Touch before being ushered off along with several other West Coasters to the USO reception room. There we were gifted a set of three red tees bearing the logo of the Gary Sinise Foundation, our hosts for the next four days. We’d been prepped in advance to come prepared to change into the shirts. Camp shirts, my daughters called them. They ensure that nobody gets lost as we are feted around Nashville. You know, like youth groups in Disneyland.

It’s been a long time since I was a camp counselor at Mt. Baker but I really loved being identified as part of this group by the camp shirts. Of course, I’m a big fan of the UK’s school uniforms. I wish public schools in the US would adopt school uniforms and ditch the pajama bottoms.

After dropping our bags at our hotel – the equisite, and for me, very poetic, Holston House, in downtown Nash, we boarded a bus with 33 others and headed off to the Gary Sinise Foundation’s headquarters for the evening. Jan and Dave were our chaperones, assigned by Sons & Daughters in Touch, because they’d done the City Adventure trip previously.

When SDIT asked if we wanted to be part of this program, they made it clear that other than the city we wouldn’t have any details about where we were going or what we were doing. We’d just have to trust the folks at the foundation to take care of us. We were forewarned that we’d be busy from early morning until late night. Over the years I’d seen posting on Social Media about the city adventures other families of the fallen had taken. When this opportunity arose I signed up primarily because Dad is from Tennessee. His name is engraved on the Vietnam panel at the War Plaza in Nashville. It seemed fitting.

Dad’s sister, Aunt Betty, lives in Nashville. So do many of my cousins. I’ve been in and out of Nashville throughout my life – on family visits and as an author featured at the Southern Festival of Books. In fact, I was just there in October with my latest book release. Aunt Betty loves to tell the story of the time, I loaded all my younguns in the van and said my goodbyes without bothering to gather our youngest – then ten-month-old Konnie – from the bedroom. Had I left without her, I needn’t have worried. Betty raised six kids of her own. I’m sure she and Uncle Dody could’ve managed Konnie.

The GSF headquarters is full of memorabilia and awards that Sinise has accumulated during his illustrious career as an actor and through his foundation’s work, which isn’t limited to the families of the fallen. The GSF also cares for the disabled veterans, building them adaptive homes, and for those survivors and families of 9-11. They serve veterans across the board and also first responders. When the hurricane swept through North Carolina and East Tennessee, the foundation was there to serve. Just recently they helped the fire department in Church Hill, Tennessee, purchase a much-needed firetruck. Some of my aunts and uncles & cousins live in Church Hill.

Basically, Sinise is about doing all the good he can, as long as he can, wherever he can. The idea of bringing families of the fallen together is to build community. Death in any form can be very isolating for the grieving. That was certainly the case for our family. I didn’t meet another person who’d lost a father in Vietnam until I was 48 years old. I’ve written about that experience many times including in the memoir After the Flag has been Folded, William Morrow/HarperCollins.

What is always been clear to me since finding community within Sons and Daughters in Touch is that our family was one of the lucky few – my siblings and I knew our dad. We were 7, 9 and 12. Many of the fallen of the American War in Vietnam never got to meet their children, of if they did, it was often briefly. Most of my friends from SDIT were infants, or toddlers or not yet born when their fathers were KIA. They have no memories, only stories told by others.

So over an elegant catered dinner at the foundation’s office, we talked mostly about our mothers, and how they handled the tragedy that would mar their lives for the decades to come. When you are widowed at age 20 or 21, or even younger, there isn’t a guidebook on how to navigate your way through that. And for our mothers there was no Gary Sinise Foundation to help them build a community of support. As my mother and others have told me – they were just kicked to the curb. They had to find ways to survive on their own. Those fortunate enough to have grandparents to step into the gap were lucky. Many did not. That the military demanded that widows and children move off base within 90 days after a death notification only added to the trauma. As the GSF so rightly notes, families of the fallen lost not only their loved ones, but their way of life and their sense of community.

And as many of us Sons and Daughters note, we lost our mothers along the way, too.

Some may, I suppose, think that given that many of us are grandparents now ourselves, we should just get over the loss of our fathers. After all it’s been sixty years this July since the telegram arrived on that trailer stoop in East Tennessee for our family. Why bother talking about it now? Or writing about it? After all there have been a bevy of new wars, several that are taking place right now as I sit here at this keyboard typing.

As long as there is a buttload of money to be made from it, wars will continue to be waged. Wars are big business for all sorts of industries. One of my cousins works for a bomb manufacturing business. Business is booming he tells me.

But as I sat at the dinner table on that first night listening to family members of the fallen talk about how their dads were still Missing in Action in Vietnam, I thought about the headlines last week. How Trump and Hegseth told a manufactured story of all the resources spent to rescue one nameless ghost pilot, I was reminded how a new war becomes a trigger for the families of the fallen.

It transports us immediately back to our childhoods, where once again silence and isolation replaced our fathers’s presence.

If not for organizations like the Gary Sinise Foundation and Sons and Daughters in Touch, silence and isolation would be the legacy for generations of children from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran, and every other place where America’s fathers and mothers are called upon to wage war.

Karen Spears Zacharias is a former journalist and an author. To learn the story of her dad, read After the Flag Has Been Folded, WmMorrow/HarperCollins.