“For the whole world is a sepulcher of heroes. Monuments will rise and be set up to them, but on far-off shores a more abiding memorial shall be kept. It is not graven on brass, not carved in stone, but etched on the living heart of all humanity.” – Pericles

Like I’m sure many of you did, I spent a fair part of this past Memorial Day working in the yard. I was working the business end of a shovel, ankle-deep in weeds and foxtails and other unnamed things that itch. It felt great to be outside and to have a yard to work in on such a ridiculously glorious afternoon.

If you were also in your yard on Memorial Day afternoon, then perhaps you too heard an unusually loud rumbling in the sky and looked up in time to see a vintage B-52 bomber slowly and laboriously making its way from Bremerton to Seattle.

I stopped to watch the plane, and I thought how lucky I was to be spending the day in my yard watching a bomber flying overhead without feeling so much as a trace of fear.

I thought how different my reaction might be if Bainbridge Island were within a war zone, if the old bomber were on an actual mission, and if at any moment its big green bomb bays might open and rain death and destruction on those unlucky enough to be living beneath its flight path.

As I watched the old plane disappear, piloted no doubt by a couple of old soldiers, I thought about all the thousands upon thousands of men and women who have served this country over the years, some of them having been conscripted into their service, but many more of them volunteering to do so for as many different reasons as there are volunteers.

War is a brutal, dehumanizing experience, and no sane society would ever ask its young people to put their lives at risk unless it was absolutely necessary. As I stood there in the garden watching the old B-52 fly-by, I wondered if protecting the freedom of people like me to stand in our gardens on sunny afternoons and watch as warplanes flew by without experiencing anything like fear or dread was a good enough reason to send young men and women into harm’s way.

I concluded that maybe freedom is really that important. If you were in the right frame of mind last Monday when the B-52 flew by, and if you listened hard enough, then in the rumblings of those old engines you just might have heard the unmistakable sound of pride and courage and honor, the screams of men falling and dying, and the cries of women and children lost in their fear and their pain.

Standing safely in our backyards on peaceful Bainbridge Island, it is very easy to take our freedom for granted. But there is nothing free about freedom.

If you’ve got it, it’s only because somebody fought for it. Writer Michael Perry said some freedoms are earned, many are conferred, and not a few carry the scent of gunpowder.

Politics and diplomacy are tricky. They come wrapped in tangled motives and good intentions, awash in shades of gray. But in the roar of a B-52, there are no blurred lines, no uncertainties.

To the men and women who have served or are now serving our country, and whose sacrifice on our behalf makes it possible for you and me to enjoy our afternoons in our yards free from fear or danger, I offer a belated but heartfelt thanks.

And for those who offered this country that “last full measure of devotion,” I offer a particular thanks. The shadow of their deaths has illuminated the lives of generations of Americans, each of whom owes them a debt that can never be fully repaid.

The best we can hope for is, in the words of the great poet W.B. Yeats, that before dying, each of them “may have known some tenderness before earth took them to her stony care.”

Tom Tyner is an attorney for the Trust for Public Land. He is author of “Skeletons From Our Closet,” a collection of writings on the island’s latte scene.