Memorial Day
I’ve been waiting two months for an inspiration to resume blogging (nice not to have deadlines) but today is Memorial Day and the fire is lit.
George Will published a great column yesterday called “The Last Doughboy” in which he paid tribute to our last surviving WWI soldier, who is a spry 107 and not only served in France with over 4 million other Americans but spent most of WWII in a Japanese prison camp, having been a civilian contractor in Manila on December 7, 1941.
Our nation is at war but I wonder where we’d be without the thousands of young folks who volunteer to keep us free and safe. Our schools do such a poor job of teaching history, and the Blame-America-First crowd dominates our media and academia so thoroughly that patriotism has been on the defensive since the 60’s. In 2004 presidential candidate Jean-François Kerry famously warned that our kids better do well in school or they’d “wind up in Iraq”, thus insinuating that the military is for dummies. Au contraire the ranks of our military are better-educated than their peers who stay out of the service. General David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency expert now running our liberation efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has a masters and PhD from Princeton, for example, and could be making millions as a CEO.
Growing up during WWII, I saw a nation united. People did without; staples were rationed, everyone had a “victory garden” to grow vegetables, there were no new cars. People in coastal cities patrolled for submarines and aircraft (I still have my Aircraft-Spotters Handbook). Gold stars hung in so many windows, denoting lost sons. More Marines died in one day on Iwo Jima and Tarawa than all military deaths in over five years in Iraq.
America is great because America is good. We have conquered fascism and communism but have helped rebuild their breeding grounds into vibrant and free societies instead of seizing their lands. We have conquered slavery at home and built the most successful multicultural society ever known. The rows on rows of crosses and stars in military cemeteries across the world speak to the sacrifices that we honor today. I’ve been to Normandy, to Pointe du Hoc where the shattered guns and barbed wire remain, but it’s the sea of white row on row that I remember.
As I write this I’m wearing a T-shirt that says “Freedom Is Not Free.” Indeed.