Of his role as alto sax player in the big band Soft Touch, Harvey Cox says: “What I do most of the time is very cerebral; to do something that uses another part of my brain, a whole other side of me, is an activity I really enjoy.”

The “very cerebral” job refers to Cox’s position as theology professor at Harvard Divinity School. Now age seventy-one, he has built a fine reputation for teaching both ministerial students and Harvard undergrads. He also is skilled at analyzing trends in religion worldwide, producing books on such subjects as liberation theology and the Pentecostal movement.

Last week Cox took me with him to the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Bedford for Soft Touch’s Christmas gig. Nineteen men strong, with a female vocalist, the band entertained a large audience assembled in a gymnasium on hospital grounds.

In attendance were veterans of World War II and all the other conflicts in which America has been involved since then. I sat among men who fought in Korea, Vietnam and in the Persian Gulf war. But no longer does a veteran of the First World War live at the Bedford institution: the last one died there two years ago aged one-hundred-and-four.

The vets obviously loved hearing the songs of the big band era along with some tunes appropriate to the Christmas season. Some of them kept returning to the dance floor at the invitation of uniformed girls from the Bedford High School junior ROTC and other guests from outside. Often they swayed very slowly from side to side, obviously working against disabilities.

Currently some five hundred veterans are hospitalized at Bedford, fewer by a half than there used to be. One explanation I heard from a physician with experience in veterans’ hospitals was that, because the United States has not been involved for a generation in wars with heavy  casualties, there are no longer so many vets with service-related injuries.

About a hundred of those at Bedford are men with Alzheimer’s disease. Some of them usually come to the monthly celebration but, for various reasons, they were not there this time. Speaking about the participation of these patients, staff member Jim Cutrumbes told me that “it’s a great therapy.”

The band members themselves turned out to be older than most of the veterans for whom they played. The majority of the band members are aged enough to have danced to the big band tunes they now play.

Murray Sheinfield of Newton, eighty-five, has been playing drums for sixty-five years. I discovered him to be a person who likes a challenge: “Anything that’s new, I like to do,” he told me.

Eighty-year-old Don Gillespie of Lexington, on piano, is himself a veteran of World War II and loves playing in this band “primarily because they play music of my era.”

Roy Fowler, of Waltham, plays the tenor sax, an instrument that he did not start until he was fifty-nine. Previously, he had never played any instrument at all. Now approaching seventy-eight, he served for many years as an Olympic trainer for the American hockey team.

My friend Harvey Cox shows the same spirit of enterprise as his musical colleagues. After many years of playing the tenor sax, often with his own band “the Embraceables,” he recently took up the alto sax.

It’s a whole other instrument and has demanded a lot of effort for him to learn. But he relishes the challenge and works hard at it, as I could tell from observing him in action at Bedford.

From that evening one scene will stay lodged in my memory for a long time. As the last number of the night, the band played a medley of patriotic pieces. One after another, the theme songs of the military branches all came rolling out. The army, the navy, the marines, and other groups had their hymns performed with snappy martial beats.

During this selection, the veterans present gathered in a large circle and marched around the dance floor. Not all really marched – some were pushed in reclining beds, others traversed the circle by wheel chair. All these men, in various states of disrepair (some missing legs), made a spectacle, at once grand and inevitably somewhat distressing.

I admired these veterans of America’s wars and peacetime military service too. They have given so much for their country and are continuing to suffer the isolation of hospital living. No matter how kind the staff and attentive their visitors, it cannot be an easy life for them.

Those who marched, at least, would seem to have remained believers in patriotism. So far as I could tell, most of these veterans still carry, along with their wounds, faith in their country’s causes.

As they finished the evening by singing “God Bless America,” I hoped that divine blessings will fall, not just on the country at large, but upon them in particular.

Richard Griffin