Memorial Day: Keeping Faith

 

Thinking of friends who did not make it back. Thinking of advice heard many years ago: There is a reason why you are here and they are not. It is your duty to find the reason, and to live your life in such a way as to make their sacrifice not in vain.

 

We have been given days, and years, and decades which others have not. How do we Keep Faith with them?

 

What responsibility, what duty, do we have--not just those of us who made it back, but we The American Citizenry and our elected officials--what duty do we have to those who made the ultimate sacrifice?

 

Does Keeping Faith mean more than saluting the flag and standing for the national anthem before a ball game? Is saying, “Thank you,” enough? Or does Keeping Faith mean something more?

 

Does it perhaps mean understanding our Rights and Freedoms as American citizens? Does it perhaps mean being vigilant and protecting those Rights and Freedoms when they are being attacked from without or being eroded from within?

 

Does it mean overseeing national decisions as to how our current military is used, and ensuring that it is not being abused? Our troops—soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen and the coast guard, then, now, throughout our history—are the will to defend, the will to pull the trigger. Without that will no nation can survive. Keeping Faith with them requires of our leaders, of all of us, that we do not waste the will.

Keeping Faith is yet much more. I think of the last scene in the film Saving Private Ryan. An old man who once was young Private Ryan stands before the graves in an American military cemetery in Europe. He turns to his wife and asks if he has led a life worthy of the sacrifice paid by so many. 

We have been given days, and years, and decades which others have not. Have we lived out lives in such a manner they would approve and rest easy?

 

John M. Del Vecchio                              http://www.the13thvalley.com/