Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear, usually in passing, about our men and women in uniform being “killed in action.” We scarcely even slow down to contemplate what that means. As the death toll mounts, politicians scream to “get us out,” even at the cost of defeat. Even at the cost of leaving us vulnerable to further attacks.
I am not a war monger, but those bumper stickers that declare “War is not the answer” are stupid. Sometimes it is the answer. Sometimes it is the only answer. Sometimes people and nations have no other option but to stand up to and put a stop to evil.
February 23 (Tuesday) of this week was the 65th anniversary of the battle for Iwo Jima. It was fought from February 19 through March 26, 1945. Thirty-five days of pure hell. In just over a month, we lost 6,821 men with another 17,000+ injured. The Japanese had 22,000 soldiers defending the island. When the smoke cleared, over 21,000 of them were dead.
A U. S. Marine who survived Iwo Jima had this to say about “killed in action”:
I have found the meaning of ‘killed in action.’ It is the body of a man that is torn with bullets and shrapnel, bloated from lying in the sun, the face black from shock with the skin falling off parts of his body, with dried blood on the ground. This is ‘killed in action.’
There is no glory or honor to it. People will talk of this glory and honor, but they don’t see the bare facts. There is no death compared to the death of a man on the battlefield. And this is the way we saw our buddies.
How can people back home expect us to be the same? We can’t be. Not with these sights burned in our brains. Not with the smell of death forever in our nostrils. Not with the thought of the awful fear never to be forgotten. We are changed forever, never to be as we were. God help our poor, lost souls.
Not the most pleasant, uplifting quote you’ll read in the blog world today, but that is the reality of those who go to war to protect and preserve freedom. As the Marines left the island, they walked through the graveyard of their fallen comrades … with the admonition from the fallen before they died: Tell the people back home they have all their tomorrows because we gave all of our todays.
Even now as you read this, there are those who are still giving up their todays for our tomorrows. May God help us all.
speechless.
Thanks for the reminder to neither take those wonderful men and women or our liberty they fight to preserve for granted. Too often I do both.
This hits a little close to home only because the survivors of these things are totally changed.
My son was discharged from the Army last January, and we’ve been dealing with his PTSD. Most times he’s okay, but then something will set him off. Like a couple of weeks ago, he was changing the battery in my mother’s car and had the engine running to charge the new one. I came out to tell him supper was ready whenever he was. Apparently, he didn’t hear me and I walked around behind him to see whatever. The reaction was . . . well, I’ll leave it to your imagination. He didn’t hurt me physically, but he was scary.
But even he – and many of his fellow military – will tell you that sometimes you have to go after your enemies and killd them dead. And destroy their stuff and networks and anything else that may help them continue their murderous ways.
I was talking recently to a young woman about her grandfather who recently passed away. They weren’t overly close and he wasn’t everything that she wanted him to be. He was a Korean veteran. He wasn’t the most communicative of sorts and saw life as a pretty simple equation. He drank a little too much and was a little withdrawn into his own world. I think he didn’t start out that way, but guys of that generation weren’t the most open about their feelings and thoughts. But there were things he saw and probably did that changed him. As you said in the blog, there wasn’t glory, just hard choices and even harder consequences. No one struck up the band when he came home, and I think he just spent the rest of his life trying to make some sense of it. I thank him and every other soldier that made the hard choices so that we here at home have the liberty to even ponder such questions.
May God rest their souls – those who died on those battlefields so long ago for our freedom.
May God comfort the souls of all who have grieved over them and those still remaining.
May God give us hearts of deepest gratitude and praise for all who have died for our country the past couple of hundred years.
Dee
This really puts things in perspective doesn’t it? I simply can’t imagine what soldiers who see this kind of action go through mentally. I pray for them. I too feel speechless.
This father of a Marine thanks you for this. They are our sons and daughters out there and they are in harm’s way. They deserve our prayers, support, and respect. Semper Fi.
As someone else said……………………..speechless.
Wow, puts things in perspective.
I too am speechless, hits close to home.