Scott Johnson at PowerLine:
In observance of Memorial Day 2007
the Wall Street Journal published a brilliant column by the late Peter Collier
to mark the occasion. The column remains timely and is accessible online here. I don’t
think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the
occasion today.
The entire column is worth reading; it begins:
Once we knew who and what to honor
on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the
men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world
saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain,
the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration.
We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can
easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in
any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.
. . .
Not long ago I was asked to write
the biographical sketches for a book featuring formal photographs of all our
living Medal of Honor recipients. As I talked with them, I was, of course,
chilled by the primal power of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had
become strangers–honored strangers, but strangers nonetheless–in our midst.
***
In my own boyhood, figures such as
Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy and John Basilone were household names. And it
was assumed that what they had done defined us as well as them, telling us what
kind of nation we were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually
unknown except for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become
the military equivalent of genre painting. There’s something wrong with that.
Mr. Collier vividly describes actions taken by Medal of
Honor recipients, and then closes his column:
We impoverish ourselves by shunting
these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national
consciousness. Their stories are not just boys’ adventure tales writ large.
They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we’ve heard many
times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we’re
uncertain about what we celebrate. We’re the land of the free for one reason
only: We’re also the home of the brave.
The full column is here.
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