Today I toast a man I now may only know through his legacy: Army Staff Sgt. Chris Hake, Enid’s son and a national hero.

Images of young Hake haunt me — my dreams and my days. He was a handsome, fit and obviously incredibly patriotic young man. Chris Hake embodies most of what is best in his generation and in all of us. In life, Hake was a walking embodiment of character, discipline, family values, patriotism, commitment and sacrifice. In death, Hake embodies all those virtues but on an elevated and intensified plane. Hake’s legacy now serves as a beacon call to all of us: Of what we may aspire to if we love the United States of America as much as we tell others, as much as we believe we do in our own hearts and minds.

The pictures recently circulated on the Internet and in the Enid News & Eagle of Chris Hake portray a man who loved his son, loved his wife, loved his parents and siblings and family, loved his friends and loved his nation so supremely he traded his young, promising life for the freedom of our nation and another nation 6,000 miles away — Iraq — the place where young Hake perished for freedom’s sake.

As most readers are well aware now, Hake and three Army comrades were killed March 23 in Baghdad when their military vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device. Hake, an infantryman and a squad leader with the 3rd Infantry Division, was in the midst of his second tour of combat duty in Iraq.

All the Chris Hake pictures trigger immense emotion within our hearts, minds and souls, but the images that move me the most personally are the pictures of Hake holding his son, Gage, and the one where baby Gage and his daddy are napping on their couch and the picture of Chris Hake at his seventh birthday party smiling widely while holding his birthday cake decorated on top with a panoply of Army soldiers and equipment. Like his own son, Chris Hake was a preciously adorable little boy.

These images haunt me. I cannot stop seeing them in my mind.

And now Chris Hake is gone. Hake gave all for our peace and for the freedoms we enjoy every day.

My chest tightens when I contemplate that adorable little boy of Staff Sgt. Hake’s who will grow up never knowing his hero father. It’s not fair such a fine young man is dead so we may all be safe, but heroes rarely die old, it seems.

It is right and proper the U.S. government saw fit to place Staff Sgt. Chris Hake to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, just outside of Washington, D.C. Since the end of our own Civil War, Arlington has been the final resting spot of our most valorous national heroes. Hake will be interred there with full military honors on Tuesday afternoon.

On Nov. 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln presented his most famous speech, “The Gettysburg Address,” on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Penn., which thereafter was consecrated as a U.S. national park.

Lincoln’s words uttered 145 years ago, at a glorious field of battle where tens of thousands of patriots died in defense of freedom, ring home today, and seem uniquely written for our own hero, Staff Sgt. Chris Hake, of Enid, Okla. President Lincoln said, in part,

“ ... from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

I pray the Iraqi people feel thankful, or soon learn to feel thankful, for the bloody price America’s finest young men and women are paying every day for their freedom and for their democracy.



Kinnamon is online/special projects editor for the Enid News & Eagle. Contact him at davidk@enidnews.com.