I believe the 4th of July exists to celebrate our independence from Great Britain. We got that freedom because Continental soldiers stood up to the British army and the mercenaries it had hired.

So, it’s about the soldiers, too.

As the holiday approaches, we’re going to hear a lot about the “Greatest Generation.”  I am sure a few aged survivors of the war will tell their stories with the kind of steely-eyed energy that’s surprising when it comes from a very old man in a wheelchair.

Everybody wants to be those people. Young men make themselves experts on World War II weapons and uniforms so they can “re-enact” the war. Some modern United States Army uniforms are now patterned on those worn in the 1940s. (I have to wonder what my Army veteran father would think if he saw a young man born in the 2000s decked out in “pinks and greens” — the uniform with green jacket and khaki trousers, for those of you who aren’t re-enactors.)

All of this leaves out one very important group of people. There are probably more of them left than there are surviving service members. I’m speaking of the wives and girlfriends those soldiers left behind — some of them forever.

Our nation — and my local, southwest Alabama community — lost one of these women a few weeks ago. She was bright, funny and extremely smart. Way back in the 1970s, she hosted a little party just before my husband and I were married. (It was my first experience with strawberries dipped in chocolate.)

Her name was Frances, like mine. Her husband, who I knew very briefly, was the kind of World War II veteran who told a few stories in a very matter-of-fact fashion. When my husband was a child, this man would visit the Colemans and the adults would exchange stories.

This man’s stories were terrifying, especially because of the way he told them. He was a bomber pilot in Europe during the war.

My husband remembers one story very well and can still repeat it.

“I looked at the wing,” the man told them. “There were holes that just appeared in it about as big as that.” He pointed to a red, round cigar canister that now sits in my sister-in-law’s living room. “No sound, just holes. The we lost a couple of engines and we bailed out.”

The way he spoke, my husband said, you would have thought he was talking about the price of soybeans — something he, as a farmer, knew a lot about.

“I was captured after a few days,” the man said. “We got one potato a day, and that’s all. At the end of the war, the (insert slur for German soldiers) were starving, too.”

The best part was the story of the Americans’ liberation. He said the Allies took them to what had once been a girls’ school, which the U.S. Army was using to house returning prisoners of war.

Apparently, the pink marble showers made quite an impression on this bunch of young men who hadn’t gotten many showers in their POW camp.

All that time, his wife waited. Frances had married her pilot in 1942.

When she died, she was among the last of those women who, like my mother, had waited out the war while their husbands were in combat.

I loved her not just because we both were named Frances, and not because we were the same gender, but because she taught me an important lesson. At her house one day, I saw the framed badges of rank she’d kept all those years later. They were faded museum pieces when I saw them in 2010, but nevertheless stood as a stark reminder that we are all in this together.

Spouses, children, girlfriends and boyfriends, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters all share the same sacrifice when their loved ones are in the military. There’s not a lot of flag waving for them, and that’s OK; but those people — along with you, me and the rest of the population — need to remember that we really are all in this together.

We were in it together when the American colonies became a nation, and we must continue to be in it together now.

In it.

Together.

Now.

If my friend Frances could speak to me today, I think she would remind me of that.

I know I would listen. I hope you would, too.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.