Another Memorial Day come and gone. I didn’t reflect too much on sacrifice – I was too busy trying to keep up with my obligations – but I did meet a number of very cool vets who had some amazing stories to tell. One fella was walking around with his son and came upon a small display with a BAR. “I carried one of those for three years,” he said and told his son to pick it up. He almost started laughing as his son staggered under the weight.
Another guy went to Canada to enlist in the RCAF and was bombing the Germans from Lancasters before the United States even entered the war. He wore an Air Force uniform with his silver US wings on his left breast and his RCAF wings on his right breast.
It’s mindboggling what people have done, and are still doing, for this country of ours. It’s more than a little humbling. In the movie Ike last night on A&E, Eisenhower says something to the effect that he can’t ask the men to die for people they’ve never met but he can ask them to die for freedom and the fact they’re willing to do so makes them heroes. In the end, isn’t that it precisely? Americans are very rarely threatened. In fact, apart from internal rebellion we’ve only actually been attacked once in our history, but we have warred for others countless times; not always out of disinterested motives of course but always mindful of the interests of others backed by our own.
To the proud few who have stood up for the right of all humans to be free and to aspire to the dizzying levels of freedom and prosperity we citizens have achieved I offer my thanks – and my deepest admiration.