The Midweek
 Motivator

Audience Development Group
A Hero, A Truck, and a Song                                                June 5, 2013
 
Tim Moore
Tim Moore, Managing Partner Audience Development Group

Managing Partner

Audience Development Group

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Greetings!

I got most of the way through the story without "losing it." Thanks to James Zimmer for sending Lee Habeeb's account that follows... "It happens now and then. You hear a story so sad, so beautiful, so filled with loss and pain and grief and love, that it makes you cry. Really cry.

Two years ago, I was making a grocery run for my family on Memorial Day when a story came on the local NPR station in Oxford, Miss. It was about a father whose son had been killed in action in northwest Afghanistan. The father was Paul Monti; his son was Sergeant Jared Monti. Jared died in Afghanistan trying to save the life of one of his men. Jared was 30 years old when he died, and was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for his heroism under fire. But that was small consolation to his father: The son he loved and admired was gone, forever.

We then heard from Jared's dad. His grief was palpable, as he told the NPR reporter some stories about his son. Stories of how his son was always helping people, especially people less fortunate than himself. His father nearly choked up telling a story about how his son once took a brand-new kitchen set he and his buddies at Fort Bragg had just purchased for their home, and gave it away to a fellow soldier's family. "One day his buddies came home and the kitchen set was missing," his father recounted. "And they asked him where it was and Jared said, 'Well, I was over at one of my soldier's houses, and his kids were eating on the floor, so I figured they needed the kitchen set more than we did.' And so the $700 kitchen set disappeared. That's what he did."

 

His dad told the reporter that his son shunned any kind of notoriety or attention. "All of his medals went in a sock drawer," Jared's dad said. "No one ever saw them; he didn't want to stand out."  Then came the part of the interview that hit me hardest: It was the moment when Paul Monti talked about his son's truck, and why he still has it, and still drives it.

I was already tearing up before that story about Jared's truck. But as the details piled up - the truck was a Dodge 4X4 Ram 1500 with decals on it that included the 10th Mountain Division, the 82nd Airborne Division, an American flag, and a Go Army sticker - I lost it.

And there I was sitting in my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot on a sunny Memorial Day in my hometown crying hard. Crying like a child. Crying as if I'd lost my child. I wasn't the only one in a car crying that day."

It turns out that a Nashville songwriter named Connie Harrington was in her car, too, listening to the very same story. Moved to tears, she pulled over to the side of the road, scribbling notes as the story proceeded. She wrote down detail upon detail, everything she could remember. When she got back home, Harrington couldn't get that story of the soldier's father and his son's truck out of her mind. So she did what writers do, and turned the words of that grieving father into a song. With the help of two co-writers, the finished product found its way to singer Lee Brice, who recorded the song called, aptly, I Drive Your Truck.

Sincerely,

Tim Moore

Tim Moore

Managing Partner 

Audience Development Group

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