Category: Veterans

A huge thank you to our poet Laureate Capt. George Harris (retired) for his annual piece for Memorial Day.

MEMORIAL DAY 2020

“On December 7, 1941, a date, which will live in infamy…”. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke these words to Congress after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In this address to Congress, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on the Japanese Empire.

Today, this Memorial Day, a day we set aside to honor all those who have given the last full measure for our freedom and our Nation, we find ourselves in a new war. But this war is against an invisible, spiked enemy, a new or novel coronavirus that has raced around the world like a wildfire in dry prairie grass. It is no respecter of age, race, religion or sex. But that is not totally true because it has dealt a severe blow to our Native American population as well as our Black and Latino population. Older people seem to be its easiest victims; they often have underlying conditions that are exacerbated by this new enemy. And now we are seeing young children, who we thought were immune to this virus, being viciously attacked.

As of today, May 20, 2020, there are 1,504,830 cases in the U.S. with 90,340 deaths. It is very possible that by Memorial Day next week, we will have lost more than 100,000 Americans.

We have been the world’s leader in many things and the last thing we would want to be is the leader in the COVID-19 pandemic. But this is where we find ourselves today. There are some 4,731,458 cases world wide and 326,169 people have died.

Physicians, nurses and other health care workers are our warriors today. They have no military-style weapons; instead, they are using ventilators, needles and syringes, drugs, and personal protective equipment in their daily struggle. And when we win this battle, which we will win, I doubt there will be any memorial built on the national mall to commentate their efforts. But hopefully, they will be remembered.

In the meantime, our military personnel continue to find themselves pitted against terrorists all-around the globe. Many are in places that most of us couldn’t find on a world map. They are there, every day struggling to defeat terrorism in its many forms. Sometimes their enemy is invisible also, using improvised explosive devices and snipers to kill and maim our young men and women. Gold star families are scattered across our nation like stars in the firmament. Hopefully, we will win this war soon and we can put away the burial flags and the mournful echos of Taps and 21 gun salutes will dim. In the meantime, I hope you will pause a moment with me this Memorial and remember our military warriors who have sworn to support and defend our Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. Also, take another moment to remember the warriors fighting this terrible virus. God bless all of them and God bless our Nation.

Our poet laureate, George Harris sent this piece to me last week.  As usual, George’s way with words and personal experiences greatly contribute to this blog.  George, thank you for your service!

Veterans Day 2017 by George Harris

They’re all gone now, those doughboys of 100 years ago with their wrapped leggings and their soup bowl helmets.  They were our grandparents or perhaps great grand grandparents eager to go vanquish the Hun as the Germans were called.  George M. Cohan was just sitting down to write, “Over There” to send our troops off with a rousing song.  Little did they know they would be facing machine guns and gas; mustard and chlorine gas that would burn their skin and their lungs.  Mr. Ramsey, our Assistant Coach and Driver Education Teacher, had bleached spots on his face and in his hair from gas attacks.  He never talked about it but we all knew what it was.

We were still enough of an agrarian nation that many of those young men and women, yes there were women in World War I, literally laid down their plowshares and picked up arms to join the British and French in The Great War-it didn’t become World War I until 23 years later when we became involved in another world war.  Like many wars, The Great War was being fought much like previous wars-troops were massed and then launched against the enemy much in the same way they had been in our own Civil War and the Spanish-American War.  But there were two big differences-machine guns and chemical warfare.  The United Kingdom lost nearly 750,000 killed while France lost 1,150,000.  Russia, Romania, Italy, Serbia and some others lost something over 2,000,000.  When the end came in 1918, we had lost nearly, 54,000.  And this doesn’t count deaths from disease, particularly the Great Flu Epidemic and the loss of civilian lives.  On the Allied Side alone, perhaps 10 million people died.  And among the Central Powers another 8.3 million military and civilians died.  This war was one of the costliest in our history.

What did we learn from this war?  Perhaps nothing because just 23 years later we found ourselves engaged in another war on a global scale that ended with the new capability of world destruction when the new atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Now we find ourselves involved in a new type of war-a war against terrorism, a war that seems endless.  Now millions of young men and women have served our Nation; hundreds of thousands have been wounded and, depending on who you ask and how they count, perhaps something on the order of 74,000 to 80,000 have died in the wars in the Middle East.

What is my point in all of this?  Although not much in favor at the moment, General Robert E. Lee once noted, “It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.”  And thus it is.  In the 241 years of our independence, over 4,000,000 young men and women have been sacrificed on the altars of the gods of war.  And we continue to offer them up with no end in sight.  Freedom has a terrible price and it should always be remembered that war is the absolute failure of diplomacy paid for with the blood of our young men and women.

Perhaps Dwight D. Eisenhower, president and leader of the world’s greatest armed force in World War II said it best:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Today I  got a weekly email from my congressman, Rob Wittman.  He was paying tribute to the veterans.  His email contained the following paragraph:

This past year, I had the pleasure of
visiting servicemembers deployed in
Afghanistan, and forward deployed in
Singapore, Australia, Germany, Italy and
Turkey. I recently spent a day in the woods
with some of our Marines training at
Quantico. On November 2, I met with veterans
who serve on my Veterans’ Advisory Council
and veterans of the Korean War. Our nation
has learned much from what happened at the
beginning of the Korean War. At that time,
our country was not prepared to go to war.
We did not ensure that our forces were ready
for combat and we sent under-trained and
under-equipped Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and
Marines into harm’s way. From that
experience,  harsh lessons were learned that
should direct our current and future
decision makers about investing in our
service members.

I was dumbfounded.  I was barely even on this earth when  the Korean War started. However, I wondered to myself, how on earth could things have deteriorated so fast in less than 5 years.  Weren’t we in tip top shape as a nation after WWII?  Didn’t we emerge  as  the most powerful nation in the world?  Well Hell, I didn’t know so I thought I’ll ask a vet.  I emailed George Harris.  For those of you who don’t know, he is a Korean War vet.  He went in when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, right out of Oklahoma.

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An anonymous guest poster via email:

On Tuesday, in Fort Walton Beach , Florida , the surviving Doolittle Raiders gathered publicly for the last time.

They once were among the most universally admired and revered men in the United States . There were 80 of the Raiders in April 1942, when they carried out one of the most courageous and heart-stirring military operations in this nation’s history. The mere mention of their unit’s name, in those years, would bring tears to the eyes of grateful Americans.

Now only four survive.

After Japan ‘s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, with the United States reeling and wounded, something dramatic was needed to turn the war effort around.

Even though there were no friendly airfields close enough to Japan for the United States to launch a retaliation, a daring plan was devised. Sixteen B-25s were modified so that they could take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. This had never before been tried — sending such big, heavy bombers from a carrier.

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Happy Memorial Day weekend. I usually overdo it with my rememberances so please just bear with me.  I love Memorial Day.  I love the sound of Rolling Thunder and I love to grab hold of that American feeling and hold it as tightly as I can.  I love a weekend that forces us to say thank you to those who are dead and gone and were it not for this national day of thanksgiving, might be forgotten.  I love the PBS Memorial Day tribute on Sunday nights each Memorial Day weekend.  I like that Memorial Day forces me to think and yes, shed a few tears.  I owe it to my country.

 People sometimes confuse Veterans Day with Memorial Day. I think that is a forgivable sin, actually. Memorial Day grew out of Decoration Day, which started during the Civil War to honor those who had fallen. Many boys were buried in far off states and the good people of the towns where they lay cleaned up the graves and decorated with flowers on Decoration Day.

In Virginia, perhaps they weren’t as charitable at northern grave sites except they thought of their own sons, husbands brothers, fathers and uncles lying in some distant land and suddenly, it didn’t matter whose side the soldier had been fighting for.

I would like to thank my dad, a vet who made it home from WWII, for teaching me to remember those who have fallen, not just on Memorial Day, but every day. It’s hard to go through Virginia without passing one of the many cemeteries lined with Civil War dead. There is a particular one, on route 250 as you head into Staunton where I first learned about recognition- Staunton National Cemetery.

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