jeffreymark

KEEP THE MAIN THING THE MAIN THING ON MEMORIAL DAY

Hot dogs, apple pie, and baseball tend to vi for our attention on this special holiday. A reader sent me some cartoons that remind us something is more important on this day than our leisurely activities. As you look at these pictures remember to keep the main thing, the main thing on Memorial Day.

A MEMORIAL DAY SALUTE

The USS Apogon a Balao-class submarine launched March 10,1943. The mascot with the "score" and a few crew members. My father, first on the left, spent two years aboard the sub as a Radioman First Class.

Originally published 5/28/07

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OUGHT TO AID THEIR FELLOW "FREE THINKERS"

In the name of academic freedom and the "liberal education" spirit, Columbia University students must hold Ahmadinejad accountable for his regime's oppression of Iranian university students. Consider this news about his student's plight:

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged students Tuesday to push for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from universities, in another sign of his determination to stamp a strong Islamic fundamentalist revival on the country.

Ahmadinejad's call was not a surprise — since taking office a year ago, he also has moved to replace pragmatic veterans in the government and diplomatic corps with former military commanders and inexperienced religious hard-liners.
Earlier this year, dozens of liberal university professors and teachers were sent into retirement, and last November, Ahmadinejad's administration for the first time named a cleric to head the country's oldest institution of higher education, Tehran University — drawing strong protests from students.
His administration also has launched crackdowns on independent journalists, web sites and bloggers.

Also consider this:

Iranian students have staged a rare demonstration against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, setting off firecrackers and burning pictures of him as he delivered a speech at Tehran university, reports said.

...an Amir Kabir University student, who witnessed the incident and did not want to be identified, told CNN that the protesting students interrupted Ahmadinejad's speech with slogans, including "Death to the dictator," "Get lost Basijis" -- a reference to right-wing students who support the government -- "Get lost liars" -- referring to the state-run press -- and "Political prisoners must be freed."

Of course the meek-mild little Persian Hitler wannabe responded by blaming all of their ills on the US. We know why, he's in trouble. And troubled people always find a devil. Iran elected the little Hitler because of a failing economy. Students need to question him as to how economic revival is tied with the oppression of free thinking in Iran. And they must also consider this:

In 1979, he became the representative of Elm-o Sanaat students in the Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries, which later became known as the OSU. The OSU was set up by Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was at the time Khomeini’s top confidant and a key figure in the clerical leadership. Beheshti wanted the OSU to organise Islamist students to counter the rapidly rising influence of the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK) among university students. The OSU played a central role in the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Members of the OSU central council, who included Ahmadinejad as well as Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, Mohsen (Mahmoud) Mirdamadi, Mohsen Kadivar, Mohsen Aghajari, and Abbas Abdi, were regularly received by Khomeini himself.

Of course I'm not attorney, but I have a question for US authorities: Do we not have grounds to arrest this man and place him on trial for kidnapping US citizens during the revolution of the late 70s and for the American embassy takeover?

ET TU GOOGLE?

Powerline's Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker post this trivial, but quizzical note.

Google decorates its page for every minor holiday you can think of, with cute figures of various sorts cavorting in and around the "Google" letters. But Memorial Day is apparently missing from the company's calendar; here is what Google looks like today:

Like most internet companies, Google apparently leans to the left. But you'd think someone at the company would have given some thought to why they had the day off today.

SCOTT adds: My friend and colleague Peter Swanson directs us to Dogpile: "They put Google to shame."

PRESIDENT BUSH'S MEMORIAL DAY SPEECH

Amen to Wilson's compelling Memorial Day post implicitly comparing Bush's loneliness to the immortal Winston Churchill. When sane Americans place Bush's presidency in its context perhaps they will awaken to his greatness. Here is a link to the video of the President's Memorial Day address.

Bush: Our Elementary Teacher

As my wife and I watched President Bush’s Memorial Day Speech she turned and said to me, "I had the strangest dream. I was in a room with other people, and President Bush was standing in front of us teaching us the Pledge of Allegiance. It was serious, too. When people weren’t paying attention he made us stop and start over."

I think my wife’s dream depicts the state of patriotism in America. Often it seems our president is the only patriot left! He stands at the head of the class teaching us the Pledge. The democrats have no clue. The main stream media roots for our enemies. Artists and celebrities wouldn’t be caught dead loving America. And many if not most elected Republicans aren’t much better. Does anyone know the Pledge of Allegiance?

This line of thinking reminds me of Winston Churchill’s plight in England in the 1930’s. He often found himself the only voice crying in the wilderness that freedom’s enemies were on the march, and that freedom would soon need a brave, heroic people who understood its value to stand and champion its cause. On April 20, 1939, in a speech at the Canada Club Churchill spoke of the sacred responsibilities of a free people,

"We must not turn from the path of duty. If the British Empire is fated to pass from life in history, we must hope it will not be by the slow processes of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right, and for truth....(W)e not only look out across the seas towards each other, but backwards to our own history, to Magna Charta, to Habeas Corpus, the Petition of Right, to Trial by Jury, to the English Common Law, and to Parliamentary Democracy. These are the milestones and monuments that mark the path along which the British race has marched to leadership and freedom...not only the glory of an ancient unconquered people, but the hope, the sure hope, of a broadening life for hundreds of millions of people."

This Memorial Day I’m thankful we have someone standing in front of us all, trying with all his might to teach us the most elementary lessons about the value of our freedom. It’s not something to take for granted and finally lose in a dusty attic. We must treasure freedom, cherish it, celebrate it, and spread it abroad to the hundreds of millions of people for whom freedom is only a dream.

A VETERAN'S STORY

We hear a lot from WWII vets, but not much from the ugly Vietnam war. Lt. Col. Al Martin of Lubbock, Texas shares his "finest hour" which took place in Nam:

After seeing service in World War II and flying all-weather jets in the Korean Conflict, Martin was thrown into the meat grinder called Vietnam. Actually, he was located in Nakhom Phanom, Thailand, were he flew his Douglas A-1 Skyraider, a single-engine fighter, into the very jaws of death along the Ho Chi Minh trail. In return, his aircraft carried a payload of death and destruction greater than the B-17 Flying Fortress of World War II fame...

Read the rest of the story here.

MEMORIAL DAY THOUGHTS

Light blogging this week. I must attend(yuk) a required business conference. I know every other blogger out there posted this piece from the W$J, but it is indeed the last word on Memorial Day:

American Honor By PETER COLLIER

Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: Those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.

Former football star Pat Tillman and Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham were killed on the same day: April 22, 2004. But as details of his death fitfully emerged from Afghanistan, Tillman has become a metaphor for the current conflict -- a victim of fratricide, disillusionment, coverup and possibly conspiracy. By comparison, Dunham, who saved several of his comrades in Iraq by falling on an insurgent's grenade, is the unknown soldier. The New York Times, which featured Abu Ghraib on its front page for 32 consecutive days, put the story of Dunham's Medal of Honor on the third page of section B.

Not long ago I was asked to write the biographical sketches for a book featuring formal photographs of all our living Medal of Honor recipients. As I talked with them, I was, of course, chilled by the primal power of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had become strangers -- honored strangers, but strangers nonetheless -- in our midst.

In my own boyhood, figures such as Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy and John Basilone were household names. And it was assumed that what they had done defined us as well as them, telling us what kind of nation we were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually unknown except for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become the military equivalent of genre painting. There's something wrong with that.

What they did in battle was extraordinary. Jose Lopez, a diminutive Mexican American from the barrio of San Antonio, was in the Ardennes forest when the Germans began the counteroffensive that became the Battle of the Bulge. As 10 enemy soldiers approached his position, he grabbed a machine gun and opened fire, killing them all. He killed two dozen more who rushed him. Knocked down by the concussion of German shells, he picked himself up, packed his weapon on his back and ran toward a group of Americans about to be surrounded. He began firing and didn't stop until all his ammunition and all that he could scrounge from other guns was gone. By then he had killed over 100 of the enemy and bought his comrades time to establish a defensive line.

Yet their stories were not only about killing. Several Medal of Honor recipients told me that the first thing they did after the battle was to find a church or some other secluded spot where they could pray, not only for those comrades they'd lost but also the enemy they'd killed.

Desmond Doss, for instance, was a conscientious objector who entered the army in 1942 and became a medic. Because of his religious convictions and refusal to carry a weapon, the men in his unit intimidated and threatened him, trying to get him to transfer out. He refused and they grudgingly accepted him. Late in 1945 he was with them in Okinawa when they got cut to pieces assaulting a Japanese stronghold.

Everyone but Mr. Doss retreated from the rocky plateau where dozens of wounded remained. Under fire, he treated them and then began moving them one by one to a steep escarpment where he roped them down to safety. Each time he succeeded, he prayed, "Dear God, please let me get just one more man." By the end of the day, he had single-handedly saved 75 GIs.

Why did they do it? Some talked of entering a zone of slow motion invulnerability, where they were spectators at their own heroism. But for most, the answer was simpler and more straightforward: They couldn't let their buddies down.

Big for his age at 14, Jack Lucas begged his mother to help him enlist after Pearl Harbor. She collaborated in lying about his age in return for his promise to someday finish school. After training at Parris Island, he was sent to Honolulu. When his unit boarded a troop ship for Iwo Jima, Mr. Lucas was ordered to remain behind for guard duty. He stowed away to be with his friends and, discovered two days out at sea, convinced his commanding officer to put him in a combat unit rather than the brig. He had just turned 17 when he hit the beach and a day later he was fighting in a Japanese trench when he saw two grenades land near his comrades.

He threw himself onto the grenades and absorbed the explosion. Later a medic, assuming he was dead, was about to take his dog tag when he saw Mr. Lucas's finger twitch. After months of treatment and recovery, he returned to school as he'd promised his mother, a ninth grader wearing a Medal of Honor around his neck.

The men in World War II always knew, although news coverage was sometimes scant, that they were in some sense performing for the people at home. The audience dwindled during Korea. By the Vietnam War, the journalists were omnipresent, but the men were performing primarily for each other. One story that expresses this isolation and comradeship involves a SEAL team ambushed on a beach after an aborted mission near North Vietnam's Cua Viet river base.

After a five-hour gunfight, Cmdr. Tom Norris, already a legend thanks to his part in a harrowing rescue mission for a downed pilot (later dramatized in the film BAT-21), stayed behind to provide covering fire while the three others headed to rendezvous with the boat sent to extract them. At the water's edge, one of the men, Mike Thornton, looked back and saw Tom Norris get hit. As the enemy moved in, he ran back through heavy fire and killed two North Vietnamese standing over Norris's body. He lifted the officer, barely alive with a shattered skull, and carried him to the water and then swam out to sea where they were picked up two hours later.

The two men have been inseparable in the 30 years since.

The POWs of Vietnam configured a mini-America in prison that upheld the values beginning to wilt at home as a result of protest and dissension. John McCain tells of Lance Sijan, an airman who ejected over North Vietnam and survived for six weeks crawling (because of his wounds) through the jungle before being captured.

Close to death when he reached Hanoi, Sijan told his captors that he would give them no information because it was against the code of conduct. When not delirious, he quizzed his cellmates about camp security and made plans to escape. The North Vietnamese were obsessed with breaking him, but never did. When he died after long sessions of torture Sijan was, in Sen. McCain's words, "a free man from a free country."

Leo Thorsness was also at the Hanoi Hilton. The Air Force pilot had taken on four MiGs trying to strafe his wingman who had parachuted out of his damaged aircraft; Mr. Thorsness destroyed two and drove off the other two. He was shot down himself soon after this engagement and found out by tap code that his name had been submitted for the Medal.

One of Mr. Thorsness's most vivid memories from seven years of imprisonment involved a fellow prisoner named Mike Christian, who one day found a grimy piece of cloth, perhaps a former handkerchief, during a visit to the nasty concrete tank where the POWs were occasionally allowed a quick sponge bath. Christian picked up the scrap of fabric and hid it.

Back in his cell he convinced prisoners to give him precious crumbs of soap so he could clean the cloth. He stole a small piece of roof tile which he laboriously ground into a powder, mixed with a bit of water and used to make horizontal stripes. He used one of the blue pills of unknown provenance the prisoners were given for all ailments to color a square in the upper left of the cloth. With a needle made from bamboo wood and thread unraveled from the cell's one blanket, Christian stitched little stars on the blue field.

"It took Mike a couple weeks to finish, working at night under his mosquito net so the guards couldn't see him," Mr. Thorsness told me. "Early one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the little flag, waving it as if in a breeze. We turned to him and saw it coming to attention and automatically saluted, some of us with tears running down our cheeks. Of course, the Vietnamese found it during a strip search, took Mike to the torture cell and beat him unmercifully. Sometime after midnight they pushed him into our cell, so bad off that even his voice was gone. But when he recovered in a couple weeks he immediately started looking for another piece of cloth."

We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys' adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we've heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we're uncertain about what we celebrate. We're the land of the free for one reason only: We're also the home of the brave.