This is an opinion column.

David Paton wasn’t born in America, but he knows American exceptionalism.

His mother Aileen was traumatized by WWII. But she taught him from birth what America meant to her, and he brought that idea across the Atlantic as a young man. He went to college here, toured the land with a band, and married “a redheaded Southern bewitching angel” who brought him to Alabama. He found love there, and built a business, and still pursued his music.

He has performed at Honor Flight events, at gatherings held to show a country’s gratitude to those who fought for it, to those who risked their lives for freedom and America’s name across the world. He has looked them in the eye and told them what his mother told him.

“I got choked up,” he said. As I did when he told the story to me.

This is that story:

I’m from England. My mother spoke occasionally about the horrors of living in London during the Blitz.

The Heinkels and Messerschmitts buzzing overhead, then later the screaming V1s and V2s. She tells of moving to a house with her kids away from London, looking out the window at a Stuka dive bomber aimed at her house at the end of the cul-de-sac and dropping a bomb. It, luckily for all, hit the asphalt on its side and caromed over the house and exploded in the woods in back.

She named friends who died in the bombings, fathers, brothers and sons who never made it back home from France, or Belgium, or Germany.

But she always ended up saying: ‘and then the Americans came…’

The U.S. really didn’t have a dog in the fight in Europe, but came anyway. The thousands who died, tens of thousands broken and damaged, the millions in armaments and support were freely given. That is American exceptionalism, the generosity of plenty.

America’s greatness is not in its power and wealth, but in its fundamental goodness and kindness.”

Paton said it wasn’t the story that made him emotional when he told it at Honor Flight events. It was those men before him, those Americans, and the weight of their sacrifice.

“I looked at those men, sitting there,” he said. “America didn’t come into this war. Americans did. They came with a happy-go-lucky attitude, landed all around London, set off in those rickety old ships, and got their heads blown off on the beaches. All Americans came … they said this is what we’ll do.”

“I looked those guys in the eye and I said, ‘You were the ones my mother was talking about.’”

Paton said his mom suffered from PTSD for decades after the war. Like many others who endured the Blitz, she froze at high-pitched sounds, for the memories of those Nazi weapons lived forever.

Aileen Paton died in 2013. She was 102 years old.

I don’t want to overstate, to equate daily events to war, but it sure feels like a battle right now, and it ought not be a partisan one.

It feels like America is in its own Blitz, when the ping of a news alert causes many to freeze as if in war. And maybe it is a war for the soul of this country and the memories of those who fought to make America great.

Not with greed and power and dictates on high, but goodness and kindness and bravery and sacrifice.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.