May 31, 2000

Freedom achieved at cost of life itself

Those of us who remain among the living never can repay the debt we owe to those soldiers, sailors and airmen who gave, in Lincoln's magnificent phrase, "their last full measure of devotion" upon the bloody fields and seas of battle so that we might live free.

Throughout our national history, ordinary Americans under arms have managed to do extraordinary things. They held out at Valley Forge and Fort McHenry. They fought down to the last inch at the Alamo. Their blood flowed over the rolling hills of Antietam. They went down with the Maine, and endured trench warfare in the no man's land of the French countryside. They fell victim to the sneak attack upon Pearl Harbor and to the Bataan Death March, and gave their all retaking beaches across the Pacific and the bluffs of Normandy. They were surrounded at Pusan, betrayed by politicians in Da Nang. In Kuwait they overwhelmed Iraq, which retaliated with Scud missiles. They've been sent to a hundred places since, not always with a clear mission in mind.

Yet our soldiers, sailors and airmen nevertheless stand ready for the next mission. Recently we spotted a bumper sticker that speaks volumes about the esprit de corps of the Corps, and the risks Marines (and others under arms) willingly take for us: "The U.S. Marines: When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight."

We are unbelievably fortunate at the turn of this century for war and its losses not to be a common experience. Few among today's young people have seen a government-issue staff car pull up to a neighbor's house and watch a pair of officers walk up the sidewalk to deliver bad news.

Our great fortune has come at a very high price. Freedom is not free. Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously said, "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away." On battlefields, in the air and at sea, however, sometimes they just die.

This past weekend was not just the symbolic beginning of summer. It was the time when we as a nation paid homage to those who made our peaceful summers possible.

For wherever our fighting men and women fell, they gave "their last full measure of devotion" to the most noble cause the world ever has known: Freedom. May God rest their brave souls.