Unfortunately, way too many people are confusing nationalism with patriotism. Nationalism is what led countries like Germany, Japan and Italy down that slippery slope–that slope that led to the slaughter of millions of people during WWII. The same misplaced nationalism had reared its ugly head prior to WWI. We all know how that worked out. The “War to End all Wars’ simply provided a petri dish for evil to germinate.
Are we on the cusp of this same destructive national phenomena? Did January 6, 2021 not show us clearly what was headed our way if calmer, wiser heads don’t prevail? I might not agree with much of anything that comes out of Liz Cheney’s mouth from a policy standpoint but I respect her for her tough stance on the truth and her efforts to preserve our democracy.
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.
The last American to die in World War I didn’t really want to fight in the first place — which makes his decision to run ahead toward enemy lines all the more confusing.
Henry Gunther died at 10:59 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, less than one minute before the end of the Great War. But it was only one year earlier that Gunther had been demoted after military censors intercepted a letter he sent home that criticized the war.
“You weren’t supposed to bad-mouth the American government,” Jonathan Casey, the Director of Archives and the Edward Jones Research Center at the National World War I Memorial, tells TIME. “You’re supposed to support everything and do what you’re told, otherwise you could get in trouble: and [Gunther] did get in trouble.”
Read the full story ofHenry Gunther in Time Magazine.
I don’t know if I feel better or worse. The fact that at any time in our history a person could be in trouble for talking smack about his or her country is disconcerting. On the other hand, perhaps it should serve as a serious warning of times to come.
Look at what happened the day before yesterday to CNN reporter Jim Acosta. He was stripped of his White House press credentials for pushing the President a little too far about the president’s terminology. Making it impossible to do your job is pretty much of a demotion in rank.
Are we looking at some sort of dystopia in our future where there is danger in criticizing your government and its elected officials? I would like to say no but I always keep that scenario in the back of my mind. You never know. One should never grow too complacent. As I age…(yes, I said the A word) I have reflected on my good fortune to have been born in this great democracy called the United States of America. Yes, I have been lucky. I have enjoyed white privilege. Not all Americans have. I have never had to think about danger from my neighbors or my government. Not all Americans have had this luxury. I have always had a roof over my head. Not all Americans have. I have enough food for me and my family. Not all Americans have. I certainly don’t think I will be run out of my country or deported. Not all Americans have this assurance. I don’t expect my door to be rammed in by my government. Some Americans can’t make that claim.
All and all, I am one very fortunate vintage chick. How did I get to be so lucky?
RICHMOND — A state legislator who once flew to Damascus for a two-hour sit-down with Bashar al-Assad took to the floor of the Virginia Senate this week to say the Syrian president might have been framed with a suspected chemical attack — if the attack happened at all.
“It is not entirely clear that there was an attack,” Sen. Richard H. Black (R-Loudoun) said in a 20-minute speech on the floor of Virginia Senate on Wednesday. “There was a doctor, from the hospital — from the main hospital in Douma — who has said, ‘We haven’t received any casualties. Nobody has been sent in.’ ”
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a global watchdog, has sent inspectors to Syria to try to confirm whether it was a chemical attack that killed dozens in Damascus on Saturday.
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.”
WASHINGTON — President Trump falsely asserted on Monday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, and other presidents did not contact the families of American troops killed in duty, drawing a swift, angry rebuke from several of Obama’s former aides.
Trump was responding to a question about why he had not spoken publicly about the killing of four US Green Berets in an ambush in Niger two weeks ago when he made the assertion. Rather than answering the reporter’s question, Trump said he had written personal letters to their families and planned to call them in the coming week. Then he pivoted to his predecessors.
“If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls,” Trump said during a news conference in the Rose Garden with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. “A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate.”
Trump’s assertion belied a long record of meetings Obama held with the families of killed service people, as well as calls and letters, dating to the earliest days of his presidency. Before he decided to deploy 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, Obama regularly traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for the arrival of the caskets of service members.
Donald Trump continues to be a liar. This time he surpassed even his own race to the bottom. He has mortified the American people on a global level and he has reinfected pain on the families of those who gave their all.
What is wrong with this moron? Yes, I will call him a moron. (Thank you, Secretary of State Tillerson) He first failed to mention the deaths of the 4 Green Berets who were killed in Niger. His lame attempts to justify this neglect turned to lying about his predecessors and then making it all about himself. No Trump, a killed service person isn’t about YOU, its about that person who gave his or her life for the country and those families who have lost a loved one. It is our country’s loss.
How many times did Presidents Obama and Bush go off, in the night, without fanfare or press, to solemnly greet those caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base? We will probably never know. We will probably never know of the personal pain service- related deaths have caused past presidents, mainly because they didn’t trumpet their grief all over the cameras.
Donald Trump is a disgrace. He owes the American people an apology as well as all gold star families. He, in particular, owes John McCain an apology while he is at it. Shame on Donald Trump, once again.
Has everyone gotten their initial Ken Burns fix? The first episode was 90 minutes last night and just excellent. Most of what I saw was new to me. I expect to learn so much from this series. Last night did not disappoint. I had no idea that the beginning issues went back to 1858.
Like much that happened post WWII, we sure misread that one, and of course, sacrificed another generation of young men as a result. 57,000 names on a wall is just too many names–too many names for something we shouldn’t have been involved in.
Start looking for parallels. How long will we be involved in our current wars? Is there an end in sight? Bush, Obama and Trump have all been swallowed up by our current wars.
When will we ever learn?
Meanwhile, enjoy a fine documentary. I look forward to seeing all sides. Each show is 90 minutes and it runs for 2 weeks. For those who miss an episode, there are lots of opportunities the next day to catch a missed show. The last few episodes appear to be 120 minutes each. The series runs 18 hours in all.
The troops who landed on the beaches of Normandy were not just Americans. The blood in those waters on June 6, 1944 was the blood of many nations who valued freedom from oppression.
As we observe D-Day, let’s remember the effort and valor that went into making that day a success. D-Day was a defining moment and a turning point in WWII.
Guest contribution by our very own poet laureate, Captain George S. Harris:
LEST WE FORGET-MEMORIAL DAY 2017
It is just a few days past the day our own Civil War ended on May 9,1865-151 years ago. On that day, two great armies and two great leaders met at Appomattox, Virginia to begin the process of bringing our nation back together again. They were there to salve the wounds that four years of war had inflicted on its participants. Some 640,000 men, 2% of our population, were lost; the worst war we have ever been engaged in. A war that saw fathers against sons and brothers against brothers in a fight to the death. It was the hope of these two great leaders, General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee, that at last we would once again seek the path to the “perfect union” our founders sought some seventy-eight years earlier during several muggy weeks in the spring and fall of 1787 in Phildelphia.
Some who read this may remember when Memorial Day was known as Decoration Day. It is a day set aside to decorate the graves of those military folks who lost their lives in service to our Nation. “Decoration Day or, if you prefer, Memorial Day, began shortly after our Civil War. There are several claims as to just when it began but decorating the graves of warriors has been around for many decades or perhaps centuries.
More than a million Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice and almost all of them in two wars-our own Civil War and World War II. While we are now engaged in the longest war we have ever known, there are fewer deaths but many more have sustained what are often euphemistically referred to as “life alternating injuries”. These injuries run from simple wounds to multiple limb loss, paralysis, traumatic brain injury and what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This latter disorder has had many names in the past but it ultimately means the terrible impact war has on the minds and souls of our military personnel.
No one goes to war who doesn’t come back changed. It is not always easily recognized but for me and others who read these words, we know because we live with it every day of our lives. This is not some made up psycho-babble, it is a real, palpable thing. Most of us continue to live and work and carry out normal lives but others do not even to the point of destroying themselves by suicide.
We have to ask ourselves, “Will the day ever come when we will no longer have any new graves to decorate on Memorial Day? When will we have peace?” In a speech at American University on June 10, 1963, only a few months before his death by assassination, President John F. Kennedy said this about peace.
“I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
This Memorial Day, more than 1,000 soldiers will place flags at more than 300,000 graves in the annual “Flags In” ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Lest we forget, this is the price of freedom for our great Nation.
God bless all those who have gone before and God bless the Untied States of America on this Memorial Day.
“Lord my boy was special and he meant so much to me…”
Those words are probably in the heart of every parent who has lost a child to the ravages of war.
This song is special to me because it was co-written by my classmate and friend, John Rimel. (Jimmy Fortune was the other co-writer,) The song also reminds me of a special Veterans Day I spent with someone’s mother from the midwest who had come to D. C. to visit the wall. She had come to find the name of her only son who died in the Vietnam on his 19th birthday. The woman had never been to the Wall before and I doubt if she ever went back. I felt honored to have spoken with her for about a half hour that day.
My generation is etched all over that wall. There are over 50,000 names on that Wall. I can’t help but feel that our country wasted the lives of those young men. It’s probably time for us to start paying more attention to the Vietnam veterans. They are starting to die off– some due to old age, some to disease, and some because of war inflicted ailments that are killing off those men in greater numbers than should be happening. I have two friends who have lost their husbands because of exposure to agent orange. How long were we told that agent orange was harmless?
This Memorial Day I would like highlight the memory of Charlie Milton, another classmate, who died in Vietnam at age 19. You know, that’s just too damn young to die.
Again the motor cycles will roar and Rolling Thunder will make its way into town to note that some of those POWs never came home. No one knows what became of them. Rolling Thunder also pays tribute to the dead. My generation is loud. Rolling Thunder is no exception.
I find it difficult to go to the Wall. If I am in a memorial kind of mood, I always choose the World War II memorial. It makes sense to me. Vietnam doesn’t. It’s also a beautiful memorial. It’s grand. It’s shining and it took far too long to be built. Soon we won’t see any veterans of that war. They are fading away. My own father would be 100 this September if he was still alive. He served in WWII.
If you have a friend or love one killed in combat, please feel free to pay tribute to them here.
Donald Trump took on Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero and won the GOP nomination anyway.
Sean Spicer took on John McCain’s expertise on military matters and got this:
The White House press secretary took an extraordinary position Wednesday, saying anyone who questioned the success of the raid in Yemen that led to the death of a Navy SEAL was doing a disservice to the SEAL’s memory. The target was McCain.
Then NBC News tracked down McCain (R-Ariz.) to get his response to Spicer. And it was something.
“Many years ago when I was imprisoned in North Vietnam, there was an attempt to rescue the POWs,” McCain began, mentioning details of his biography that everyone knows but McCain included for emphasis.
He continued: “Unfortunately, the prison had been evacuated. But the brave men who took on that mission and risked their lives in an effort to rescue us prisoners of war were genuine American heroes. Because the mission failed did not in any way diminish their courage and willingness to help their fellow Americans who were held captive. Mr. Spicer should know that story.”
McCain then walked away, punctuating the comment.
Senator McCain–you go, guy! Despite what Trump says, John McCain is a war hero. Unlike Trump, he does know quite a bit about war and military raids. He is certainly not someone that either Trump or Spicer should blow off.
After 9-11, I asked my mother how it was different from Pearl Harbor and if she knew at the time how Pearl Harbor was going to affect all of them. She said on that Sunday afternoon, none of them had any idea just how life-altering the attack on Pearl Harbor would be on their lives. Most people had never heard of Pearl Harbor.
“Pearl Harbor” would soon be a household word in every American home. Yes, it was life-altering for just about everyone in the world at that time and for as much of the future as most of us can imagine.
75 years ago seems like ancient history to many people. To put some of the passage of time into perspective, Pearl Harbor happened 80 years after the start of the Civil War. Queen Elizabeth was a young woman driving an ambulance for her country. She was still a princess. My mother was going to marry my father in 6 months. My father would enlist a year to the day after Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor will always be remembered and will always be a solemn day for America.
Alarms sounded on United States Air Force bases in Spain and officers began packing all the low-ranking troops they could grab onto buses for a secret mission. There were cooks, grocery clerks and even musicians from the Air Force band.
It was a late winter night in 1966 and a fully loaded B-52 bomber on a Cold War nuclear patrol had collided with a refueling jet high over the Spanish coast, freeing four hydrogen bombs that went tumbling toward a farming village called Palomares, a patchwork of small fields and tile-roofed white houses in an out-of-the-way corner of Spain’s rugged southern coast that had changed little since Roman times.
It was one of the biggest nuclear accidents in history, and the United States wanted it cleaned up quickly and quietly. But if the men getting onto buses were told anything about the Air Force’s plan for them to clean up spilled radioactive material, it was usually, “Don’t worry.”
As Memorial Day approaches once again, I have been thinking about it more and more. Perhaps it is because I have been reading more books about the war, the latest being “With the Old Breed” by E.B. Sledge who was a Marine mortar man In K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division during the battles of Pelilieu and Okinawa.
As we know, Memorial Day, is a day when we, as Nation, remember those who died in the service of our Nation. Those of us of a “certain age” remember this day as Decoration Day, which was established shortly after the Civil War. And we have many Americans to remember because more than a million Americans have died in all the wars we have fought from the Revolutionary War to our present 15 year war in the Middle East.
Some 2,400 years ago, Plato said, “The dead have seen the end of war.” They lie silently in military cemeteries all over our Nation from our National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia to cemeteries in every state of the union and in cemeteries overseas. These cemeteries bear witness to the cost of war. Headstones and monuments, including our Tomb of the Unknowns, stand as silent sentries over those who have given the last full measure of devotion.
But what of those who have given less that the last full measure? In the last 15 years, more than a million young men and women have had their lives altered forever. Some have had “million dollar wounds” but many have lost one or more limbs while others have suffered traumatic brain injuries and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Across our nation, 22 veterans die by their own hand every day. That’s one every 65 minutes. And our Veterans Administration health care system is overwhelmed. Just as we owe those who have fallen for their sacrifice, we also owe those remain among us.
So today, when you pause to remember those who have died in the service of our Nation, I ask that you take a few moments to remember those who served and came home to live among us to remind us that, as John Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
Thank you, George, for your words of honor again this year. For those who don’t know, George Harris is our honorary poet laureate of Moonhowlings. George began his military career as a young kid, age 18, in the Navy. He served as a corpsman in Korea and in Vietnam. He has certainly seen more than his fair share of mayhem and destruction of the human soul.
Thanks again, George, for guiding us in the right direction on this day.
