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My brother served in Iraq and returned to us unharmed. The post office in my former town is named after a young man killed in Afghanistan. I often think of the stark contrast between our two families. Lucky, blessed, fortunate...all those words aren’t strong enough to describe the feelings we had when my brother came home. Then I think of the young man’s name over the post office entrance and the chasm of grief his death ripped through his own family. How his parents, like mine would have been had we lost our soldier, will never be the same. They never got to experience his growing older, perhaps starting his own family, watching as he embarked on a career. The empty seat at the table at holidays. He was only in his early 20s, the same age my brother was when he went overseas.

Today I’ll take a moment to sit with their grief, and the pain of all those who either got the call or answered the knock at the door to find uniformed soldiers with unfathomable news. God bless them all.

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founding

Thank you, Bari, for publishing this account. My father grew up in modest circumstances in rural Texas. He was the first in his family to go to college on a scholarship working three part-time jobs to cover his costs. The day after Pearl Harbor he, who had never been out of the State of Texas, enlisted in the US Navy. 16 weeks later he was flying fighter planes off a carrier in the South Pacific, earning Ace status in aerial combat, something he would never talk about after the war. He went on to spend 33 years as a Naval Aviator - Tom Cruise without the melodrama - retiring as a highly decorated officer. He, along with all of our warriors, from PFC Knott to General McMasters exemplify values common in my father’s time but increasingly uncommon today - Duty, Honor, Country. To them, these were values worth risking and, at times, forfeiting your life for. Our warriors, then and now, represent the very best of us. Their blood, sweat, and tears paid for the freedoms and opportunities that are taken for granted today, a fact that we forget at our peril.

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founding

No sufficient words, merely gratitude for our service members, our veterans and their families.

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A great tribute to Private First Class Joseph Knott. I feel sorrow for his friends and family. When paying tribute today we should also think honestly about the true rationale on why we send these men into conflicts that can & do take their lives. I suppose that there is little question where we must deploy our troops for our national security but of all the continuous conflicts in my 56 years it’s difficult for me to think of one that justifies the toll that we’ve burdened the friends and families of those who’ve lost their loved ones. I give thoughts and prayers to those men & women who’ve served today. I also hope that at some point our leaders will stop making the decisions to sacrifice them.

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I live in Israel, where most young people serve in some capacity. I currently have 2 sons in the IDF, and last month each had a narrow escape out in the field, that in the end injured another young man instead. In such a small country - with 24,213 lost soldiers since 1860 - it is rare for an Israeli family to lack a connection to an injured or murdered soldier, and our Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) is widely commemorated throughout the country with sirens, visits to gravesites and military cemeteries, and solemn ceremonies.

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If you have never lived with the military, it’s hard to explain what truly good and dedicated soldiers, neighbors, and friends these men and women are. Those that gave their all, should never be forgotten and only by remaining free and being a nation with compassion and a shining light is how we must honor them.

So many lives cut short. May their souls be blessed and also the families that have paid the price also. They now only have memories.

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As long as we have a Communist Fifth Column, how can we any more tell any of our young men and women they are "fighting for freedom"? We won the battle in Vietnam. We had a signed peace treaty which was earned by battlefield success. The war was over and we won. Then Nixon was undermined in what I personally believe was a CIA operation, but which was certainly a Democrat led political war of aggression, and we retreated. We retreated from a war we had won at the cost of the lives of some 60,000 young men, and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were subsequently murdered in cold blood, million of families were ripped apart--the parents sent to work and reeducation camps, the children to indoctrination in the North--and all the hippies and "peaceniks" who had unwittingly done so much to destroy South Vietnam took to cocaine and discos.

And Iraq? We CREATED ISIS. Obama trained and funded them when they were still for a brief period inaccurately called "freedom fighters", so they could overthrow Assad in Syria, as part of our long and to me still incomprehensible war with Russia, whose proxy Assad is and remains in that region.

Afghanistan? We not only retreated from a war we had won, not only left billions in military hardware, but left large piles of CASH. And we snuck out in the middle of the night, without even telling our putative allies. It was disgusting and ignominious.

Who runs this damn country? It is not people who love our way of life and freedom. I would not want either of my kids serving in the military, and am a staunch patriot, at least as far as the ideals of this country go.

Wake up, people. It's late in the evening.

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Thank you Gen. McMaster and Bari for reminding us that Memorial Day is not a "holiday." But something different. Where we remember the fallen and their loved ones and the debt we owe them.

I had two additional thoughts.

First of my own father. Who fought in the jungles on Guadalcanal, New Guinea and the Philippines. So many of his generation came back to us with deep but untreated wounds. Wounds that wounded their families. Today we speak of PTSD for every unpleasant event. These men were simply discharged and told to pick up their lives and rebuild our land. We need to honor and understand them and the horrors they endured. Would we have done as well? I don't think so.

Second, my memories now, as on every Memorial Day, drift to my cousin, Sgt. Patrick McDaniel, who was killed in Vietnam (actually the Cambodian invasion) when his jeep was hit by a rocket and he died while giving covering fire to protect his fellow soldiers. I think of him lying now in a peaceful corner of Pennsylvania, while he should be enjoying his grandchildren, as I am. There is, however, a somewhat happy ending to this story. While home on leave, Pat had fathered a son - a boy he never knew. A boy who would grow up to win the award named for Pat at the very high school they both attended. And that night, after the ceremony David's mother confessed the truth to him. The sadness of it all - Pat's broken parents lived and died only a few miles from the grandson they never knew. Life, in all its wonder.

War is cruel. It is ugly. It is not a sporting contest. But we must never forget that "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."

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Beautifully written and heartfelt tribute, Lt. General McMaster. I’ll think about PFC Knott on this Memorial Day and will always be grateful to him and very proud that America produces people like him.

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This wonderful tribute to a fallen comrade demonstrates so completely the marked differences of the politicians' motivations and the soldiers' motivations. I have no problem denigrating politicians, but never our troops.

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Thank you General McMaster for this moving essay. I can remember when my parents called it "Decoration Day", and according to various stories it began as a day to remember the Civil War dead (especially on the Union side because apparently it started in Boalsburg, PA in 1864 before the war ended). At some point, around 1970, Decoration Day or Memorial Day was changed from 30 May to the last Monday in May, so that everybody could have a three-day weekend. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm not so sure...just seems to be another day for shopping (lots of Memorial Day weekend sales), slurping and eating and watching baseball on TV. Somehow all these three-day weekends have trivialized something that could and should bring us together...a shared history of sacrifice and purpose.

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Over the past decade, questioning the feminist narrative has brought to mind the inequality of males being obligated to go to war --- and probably die there. This is a circumstance I cannot even begin to imagine, though that sympathy has been helped along by novels written by men who were obligated to go to war. Richard Yates comes to mind. And yet, when I bring this up in class, it's met with blank stares. Those born after Vietnam just don't get it.

What voluntary service did was divide us from what used to unite us. In those novels, the upper class men bonded with the lower class men. They were men hell bent on getting each other out of there. These days, this 'service' is remote to most people.

I recently renewed a friendship with someone whose father served in WWII, and her brother in Afghanistan. Her brother's tank got hit and his buddy died next to him. When he completed his service and returned home with a serious case of PTSD, his wife disowned him. Fortunately, he wound up with a great nurse -- who became his next wife.

To think we now have youth who claim to be "traumatized" by a pinch on the butt.

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May 29, 2023·edited May 29, 2023

My brother was in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, Company E, 3rd of the Ist, if I recall correctly. He became buddies with Miles White, a bond formed quickly, as invariably happens in active combat zones. He watched young Cpl. White die from one of Charlie’s bullets. My brother named his son after Miles. I’ve visited his plaque at the Vietnam War Memorial wall in D.C. Today I remember Marine Cpl. Miles White. Rest in peace.

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Word. To die for one's country is, after dying for one's faith in God, the supreme act of charity. Memorial Day is not celebrated in other countries. What a privilege to have a national public holiday set apart to honour these soldiers.

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I thought this name looked familiar. He was the National Security Adviser under Trump, after Flynn was taken out by the Deep State for crimes Joe Biden and his people bragged about committing. He served multiple years in jail, after a lifetime of difficult and honorable service, because of people like John Brennan and James Comey. And possibly H.R. McMaster. I'm not going to refresh memory, but among other things, he agreed with the Russian Collusion hoax publicly. Given that it was always a hoax, that is either a very stupid thing for an intelligence professional to do; or a very dishonest one.

This is a core reality I can't understand: how and why do intelligent, brave and seemingly patriotic Americans sign on to patently anti-democratic authoritarian schemes, which often include highly profitable war ventures? Is it money? Do you fight for a while out of idealism, realize it's all BS, then take the first big check thrown your way? Was it always dishonest? I really can't tell. I suppose it must be a mixture.

But that many Americans who should know better are working hard to undermine the law and the Will of the People is beyond dispute in my opinion. And if more of them don't start speaking up and fighting back against their own, I can't see how we are anything but a paper democracy five years from now, if indeed we have not already lost.

These are hard truths. Tough to swallow. But I'm not asking anyone to die for their country, or parents to mourn their children, or children their parents. That mainly seems to me increasingly to be the people Eisenhower and Smedley Butler (who by the way was asked to lead a Fascist revolution in this country but refused) warned us about.

And I will name one name: Josh Hagar. He was killed by an IED in Iraq around 2006. It made his father sick with grief. I honor him today by demanding more from all of you. Suck it up and see the world as it is, not as you want it to be.

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I wince at the loss of these fine young men. One can reasonably ask if their sacrifices were in vain, particularly in Afghanistan. But, I work with Operation 300 in Florida, and I can tell you the families of the fallen, and the volunteers who run Operation 300 are the finest of America. That such men, and the families they and their wives build, still exist gives me hope for a country that seems every day becoming unhinged; and casually, even gleefully, throwing away the birthright of freedom so many have fought for.

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