Tribute to the Military

For them All

How often (but not often enough) we gather in hall and chamber, in chapel, mosque and synagogue, near the ocean or by Flanders' Fields, to remember once more with the best words we can summon for the deepest emotions we know, one solemn, terrible yet wonderful truth. It is this: We stand where we stand because of military might. We are where we are because hundreds of thousand of Americans, millions, said yes when called to the colors over the painful centuries of this nation's birth.
We live where we live because the military --- cold word --- because our fathers and brothers and sons and uncles said sure, give me a gun and dress me up right; this is worth fighting for. Women, too, not just in these public years but early on, put the lie to the notion that there existed a weaker sex and went to war.
All --- all, all, all --- fought private terrors and found certain glory, and died as the fates would have it. Every man and woman created, protected and preserved the impudent, the unlikely, the dear place they knew as home, the United States of America.
As often as we gather, it is never often enough. Revere them, honor them, call them grand, proclaim them heroic. All true. But most important, for this assembly and for all others in glade and glen from Atlantic to Pacific: remember them.

Tribute presented by John Van Doorn   

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