I can’t write about politics today. It’s too important an occasion.
They came from cities, towns, villages, and family farms that spanned the continent. They came because they were called – because they heard the call, felt it in the marrow of their bones, and knew that they could not refuse it.
They arrived at their training sites unready, young men accustomed to the labors of peace. They would be ready when it was time for them to embark. Hard men who knew the trials they would face made sure of it.
They journeyed to distant lands to do battle against the armies of foreign tyrants. Each meeting sounded a clang that would ring down the centuries. Their foes came from cultures that had glorified war for generations. Yet invariably, they triumphed.
Such triumphs are bought with blood. Some would never return home. Others would be irreparably changed. Yet they fought, and won, on fields that circled the globe: some of them places Americans had never been before, places whose names they could barely pronounce.
The casus belli wasn’t always a wise one. Some would be regretted afterward. It didn’t matter to the young men at arms. They went, they fought, and they bled.
This is their day.
Remember them.
2 comments:
This day remember Cpl White who died on Guadalcanal and the hundreds of thousands just like him through the years. Those from Bagram to Pleiku, from Flanders to Tripoli. From an Army vet, the son of a Pearl Harbor survivor, let me remind all of you how blessed you are to come from a land that gave us all of those fine men and women.
Thank you to all who have sacrificed for our country, for our families, for us. We remember you.
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