Sometimes I have to blog about things that aren’t funny. I wish our country took this holiday more seriously. Our country was founded, with a third still passionately loyal to the crown, by patriots who had had enough with England’s oppression and taxation. It would never have happened without our soldiers. Racked with disease, wrapping their unshod feet with rags, not being paid, several men banded together under the great Washington, they fought under the reality of being hung as traitors to the crown.
Since then, men in the Civil War fought to preserve the Union and later to free all men in the country, even running backwards to avoid being shot in the back during orders to retreat. Warriors to end, choosing honor over their own safety. I look at pictures of doughboys and WW2 vets before the war, then afterwards with the thousand year stare that comes with having to see other men fall, both ally and foe. My own father was a forward observer in Vietnam for the 101st Airborne. Due to clerical bullshit, he still hasn’t received his medals thanks to bureaucratic mistakes and paperwork.
I suggest you read about the Medal of Honor winners and individual combat stories and dare you not to be moved to your core reading about the raw bravery and self-sacrifice. The innocence lost forever, for us, for the principles of freedom. The history of the world is one of tyranny and oppression, yet in this nation, we have thousands of heroes that have died or been mauled for life physically and emotionally; standing up to kings, dictators, despots and even mass murders. Our government orders these men to their doom as the horrors of PTSD and post war life take their toll. They carry on, the horrors of war haunt them for their sacrifices. So we have a holiday for them. We can do more. I encourage everyone to do all they can. Check out www.woundedwarriorproject.org, the USO, or other ways to say thanks and lend a hand. It is the least we can do. God bless America and our vets.
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.
Douglas MacArthur