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Memorial Day
26 May 2008 Patriot Vol. 08 No. 22
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Memorial Day 2008
THE FOUNDATION
“I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than all the means...” —John Adams
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Memorial Day is reserved by American Patriots as a day to honor the service and sacrifice of fallen men and women who donned our Armed Forces uniforms with honor. We at The Patriot pay our humble respects to those that gave the ultimate sacrifice as members of the United States Armed Forces. We will remember you always.
Accordingly, this tribute is in honor of our fallen American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coastguardsmen.
Please join Patriots honoring Memorial Day across our great nation on Monday by observing a moment of silence at 1500 local time for remembrance and prayer. Flags should be flown at half-staff until noon, local time. Please give a personal word of gratitude and comfort to surviving family members who grieve for a beloved warrior fallen in battlefields defending our cherished liberties.
(For The Patriot’s tribute to our Armed Forces, see “To Support and Defend... So Help Me God.”)
INSIGHT
“[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us re-consecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.” —Dwight Eisenhower
“No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.” —Woodrow Wilson
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” —Sir Winston Churchill
“The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth.” —Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson
“No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.” —Calvin Coolidge
LIBERTY
“In November 1776, after Washington had lost four battles and just before he crossed the Delaware to Trenton, British commanders offered a pardon to all who would swear allegiance to the crown. It was time to put up or shut up. I can hope I would have remained steadfast then, resolute in confidence that neither I nor my family would ever again sing ‘God Save the King.’ I didn’t have to make that choice. Thousands of men and women who went before us did, and thank God for every one of them.” —Suzanne Fields
OPINION IN BRIEF
“Of our three national holidays, for me, Memorial Day is the most significant. The Fourth of July celebrates our independence. Harkening back to our beginnings, Thanksgiving recalls our religious roots. But it’s the blood and guts (the suffering and sacrifice) symbolized by Memorial Day that made America possible. To make ideals real—and to protect and preserve them—requires payment in the coin of strife and death.” —Don Feder
FOR THE RECORD
“A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad. The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.” —Ben Stein
THE GIPPER
“Once each May, amid the quiet hills and rolling lanes and breeze-brushed trees of Arlington National Cemetery, far above the majestic Potomac and the monuments and memorials of our Nation’s Capital just beyond, the graves of America’s military dead are decorated with the beautiful flag that in life these brave souls followed and loved. This scene is repeated across our land and around the world, wherever our defenders rest. Let us hold it our sacred duty and our inestimable privilege on this day to decorate these graves ourselves—with a fervent prayer and a pledge of true allegiance to the cause of liberty, peace, and country for which America’s own have ever served and sacrificed... Our pledge and our prayer this day are those of free men and free women who know that all we hold dear must constantly be built up, fostered, revered and guarded vigilantly from those in every age who seek its destruction. We know, as have our Nation’s defenders down through the years, that there can never be peace without its essential elements of liberty, justice and independence. Those true and only building blocks of peace were the lone and lasting cause and hope and prayer that lighted the way of those whom we honor and remember this Memorial Day. To keep faith with our hallowed dead, let us be sure, and very sure, today and every day of our lives, that we keep their cause, their hope, their prayer, forever our country’s own.” —Ronald Reagan
THE LAST WORD
American Anthem
All we’ve been given by those who came before:
the dream of a nation where freedom would endure.
The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day.
What shall be our legacy? What will our children say?
Let them say of me I was one who believed in sharing the blessings I received.
Let me know in my heart when my days are through,
America, America, I gave my best to you.
Each generation from the plains to distant shore
with the gifts that they were given were determined to leave more.
Valiant battles fought together, acts of conscience fought alone.
Those are the seeds from which America has grown.
Let them say of me I was one who believed in sharing the blessings I received.
Let me know in my heart when my days are through,
America, America, I gave my best to you.
For those who think they have nothing to share,
who fear in their hearts there is no hero there,
know that quiet acts of dignity are that
which fortifies the soul of a generation that never dies.
Let them say of me I was one who believed in sharing the blessings I received.
Let me know in my heart when my days are through:
America, America, I gave my best to you.
Veritas vos Liberabit—Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families—especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)
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*PUBLIUS*
The Patriot Post (PatriotPost.US) is protected speech pursuant to the "inalienable rights" of all men, and the First (and Second) Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.
In God we trust.
2008 © Publius Press, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
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This is a copy of the essay I published three years ago on Memorial Day in our local paper. It is a true story, and the subject of it died last year, in obscurity. I doubt his family has a clue what the framed medals on their wall mean, but I know, and I will not forget. We have a lot of vets in my family, going back a lot of generations. Physical limitations prevented me from joining them, but there are no words that can adequately express my pride in each and every one of them. There is no way to calculate the debt I owe to him, to them, and to each and every vet. Compared to their sacrifices, maybe this doesn't count for an awful lot, but it is a thank you from the heart. There have been other awards since, and you can find them and all of the others with their stories here: http://www.homeofheros.com/index.html
Heroes
by Thomas J. Diegoli © 2005
It all started with an innocent question. A friend had a job in elder care, and one of her clients was an aging veteran, sliding slowly into a pleasant dementia. Names and details are omitted to protect the family’s privacy.
“He has some medals and patches and things in frames on the wall, but when I asked him about them, he kept changing the subject,” she explained. “But now I’m curious. I want to know more about them.”
“Well,” I answered her, “there are lots of different military medals, maybe hundreds of them. I only know enough to recognize a few of the more common ones, describe them to me.”
“One of them is easy,” she told me, “I knew it right away. A purple heart on a purple ribbon. That’s for being wounded, right? He has the scars.”
“That’s right. The Purple Heart is awarded for battle wounds. What did the others look like?”
She went on to describe a WWII service medal, Distinguished Marksman, and also a Bronze Star.
“I’m not surprised at his reticence. He was a US Army combat veteran in WWII. Whatever he did to earn a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and then make it back alive, there were probably a lot of his friends that paid the ultimate price and never made it home. The memories can be pretty painful. Some vets never get over them and can have nightmares for decades afterwards. They know a little about posttraumatic stress disorder now, but back then, the study was still in its infancy. Mostly they were told things like ‘Be a man. You’ll get over it.’ Some did, many didn’t.
“Don’t pester him about it,” I told her. “You’ve shown some interest, and if he wants to tell you about them, he’ll do it in his own time. What were in the other frames?”
“Oh, one had some patches with stripes, colored patches with numbers on them, long ribbons with different colored bands on them, and little round brass thingys with ‘US’ on them. There was a photo in it, too, of him as a young man. You can see how much his son resembles him.”
“Those are rank insignia, unit patches, and service ribbons. The unit patches and service ribbons can give clues to where he saw action and when. Some of the patterns matched the colors on the medal ribbons, right?”
“Yes, they did match. Some of them did, anyway.”
“If you can sketch or photograph them, I can look them up and get you some more specific information.”
“Okay, I’ll do that. But there was one more. The frame only had one medal in it, not like the others.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the other medals were the kind that pin on. This one was different. It had a long blue ribbon, like an Olympic medal, like it went around your neck.”
“W-what color did you say?” My throat started to get a little tight.
“Blue. Dark blue. There were some little stars embroidered on it where the medal hung. There was a gold eagle with the word ‘Valor’ and below it a kind of wreath with a star. Any idea what it is? Have you ever seen one?”
“Only in pictures.” It was really getting difficult to speak. “There’s only one medal with a blue ribbon like that. Only one.”
“Then you know what it is.”
I nodded. No more words came out.
“What’s the matter? Are you alright?”
It seemed like I had entered a dream world. Numbly, I went to the computer and found the appropriate website. There we found his name and a short description of the incident and circumstances that resulted in the award. I am not the least bit ashamed to say that we were both crying when we finished. I still couldn’t talk. That was over a year ago. My hands are shaking as I try to type it today. I got to shake his hand when I met them later on an outing to the supermarket. I never let on that I knew, but I will never forget it.
Why? Because there are very few who have been awarded the Congressional Medal, our country’s highest military decoration. Most are awarded posthumously. The latest went to US Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, KIA in Operation Iraqi Freedom on April 4th, 2003. Before that, Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sgt. 1st Class Randall Shughart of the Army’s Delta Force in 1994 for their heroism in Somalia.
It is very important never to lose sight of the fact that all the men and women who have and had the courage and conviction to serve our country are heroes. They deserve our thanks and our support. In a culture where athletes and actors are idolized, it needs to be pointed out that there are real heroes, among us all the time. These are people we see every day and never recognize for who they are, never realize the prices they have paid, the sacrifices they and their families have made, the memories they must live with. All for us. And those are just the ones still with us.
When was the last time you said thank you?
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Thank you for the story, and if you should get the Families permissin to publish His Story, we would be Gratefull to read it, and thankful to have been served but such a man!
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Thanks for the read fellas. Still get lumps from that kind of story.
