My Thoughts On Memorial Day Weekend.

While we think about our troops overseas and in harms way let us not forget the other young men who fought for our respective countries.

Let us never forget that the men who are long gone from us were also just boys when they fought, were wounded, came home or never did.

I am sometimes sickened when I see the very elderly subjected to the jokes and comments that befall us all when we get so old that we can no longer come even close to being the men we were.

I was 2 months old when these old men stormed the Normandy beaches or parachuted behind enemy lines and saved the world as we know it. The men depicted in "Band of Brothers" are mostly gone now. But they knew the bitterness of Bastogne and the horrors of the camps they liberated.

I think of my friends who suffered in the jungles of Vietnam in a war that many of us thought never should have been fought but who served and died nonetheless. I hated that war but was sickened by the way our boys were treated when they returned.

Much is said about the young boys and girls (because that is what they are to me) who are fighting today and we honor them as we should. I have traveled often between Shannon and the USA and have run into many many of them either coming or going from the wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan. I have bought them coffee (it was always early morning) and always made it a point to say "Thank you and please stay safe." Yes it made me feel good and I know it was appreciated but, in reality, I know it was my way of recognizing those old men in Europe and the Pacific and my high school and college friends who will never attend a reunion.

Keep in mind that you don't have to believe in any war in order to honor the boys and girls who fight or who fought them. What would our world be without them?

 

Nicely put Barry.

You mention Europe and World War II.
I spend about a month each year in France.
Last year we visited Normandy. The local French still have a great deal of respect towards the men from GB USA Canada Australia and other allied countries who gave their lives to liberate them. I didn't realise that the allied front was over 60 miles long. It is difficult to visualise that many men.
What was most poignant were the war graves.
They are kept immaculate. It is difficult to walk through the cemetery without shedding a tear.

Even more poignant was the village of Orador sur Glane. ( Google it ).
It is left exactly as the Nazis left it.
They rounded up the whole village men in the school women and children in the church.
They then surrounded the two buildings and shot everybody. I think only one child survived to tell the tale.
They then went back the next day and burnt the whole village.
It is now a museum.
I walked around taking photographs like a typical tourist. By the time I got to the church I had put my camera away.
It was difficult not to cry.
Bullet holes could be seen clearly and a childs rusting pram - flattened.

No birds sing or fly over the village.
People talk in hushed voices.
If our politicians visited this place they would certainly think twice about sending our boys to war again.

The car in the picture below is the doctor's.
It is where he left it.

This place had more of an impact on me that I realised at the time - and even then we had to go and get a strong coffee after leaving the village.

 

Respect, a funny thing everyone seems to want it and ask for it but, few now days seem to realise it has to be given and earned to be received, shame the young don't respect the fact that without the sacrifices of their forefathers they wouldn't be able to stand and shout, jokes and comments freely without fearing for their lives.