Today is Memorial Day. It is the day that Americans pause for a moment to remember, honor, and give thanks to all the people in our five service branches, the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard, who have sacrificed themselves for our country. The rest of us owe these people for everything that we have. Spanning four centuries, every war fought by Americans from the Revolutionary War to the two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the current Global War on Terror, has influenced who we are as a nation, and what we have accomplished.
I wanted to write something profound to mark this important day. But in the course of my research I came across the speech that President Ronald Reagan gave at Arlington cemetary on Memorial Day, 1982. He said it so much better than I ever could, so here is a particularly relevant excerpt from one of this country's greatest presidents. God bless our service people, our veterans, and our country:
"The willingness of some to give their lives so that others might live never fails to evoke in us a sense of wonder and mystery. One gets that feeling here on this hallowed ground, and I have known that same poignant feeling as I looked out across the rows of white crosses and Stars of David in Europe, in the Philippines, and the military cemeteries here in our own land. Each one marks the resting place of an American hero and, in my lifetime, the heroes of World War I, the Doughboys, the GI's of World War II or Korea or Vietnam. They span several generations of young Americans, all different and yet all alike, like the markers above their resting places, all alike in a truly meaningful way.
"Winston Churchill said of those he knew in World War II they seemed to be the only young men who could laugh and fight at the same time. A great general in that war called them our secret weapon, ``just the best darn kids in the world.'' Each died for a cause he considered more important than his own life. Well, they didn't volunteer to die; they volunteered to defend values for which men have always been willing to die if need be, the values which make up what we call civilization. And how they must have wished, in all the ugliness that war brings, that no other generation of young men to follow would have to undergo that same experience.
"As we honor their memory today, let us pledge that their lives, their sacrifices, their valor shall be justified and remembered for as long as God gives life to this nation. And let us also pledge to do our utmost to carry out what must have been their wish: that no other generation of young men will ever have to share their experiences and repeat their sacrifice.
"Earlier today, with the music that we have heard and that of our National Anthem -- I can't claim to know the words of all the national anthems in the world, but I don't know of any other that ends with a question and a challenge as ours does: Does that flag still wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? That is what we must all ask."
President Ronald Reagan, Memorial Day, 1982.
No comments:
Post a Comment