Date:   5/23/2008 5:49:16 PM ( 16 y ago)
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URL:   https://www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=1179099

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Monday, 26 May, is Memorial Day. Please set it aside in reverence for all those who have served with honor and are now departed. And please join me for a moment of silence at 1500 hours your local time, for remembrance and prayer. Semper Fi, Buddha Bill aka Snakeater USMC

“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” —John Stuart Mill

You’ve probably seen the bumper sticker somewhere along the road. It depicts an American flag, accompanied by the words ‘These colors don’t run.’ I’m always glad to see this because it reminds me of an incident from my confinement in North Vietnam... Then a major in the U.S. Air Force, I had been captured and imprisoned from 1967 to 1973. Our treatment had been frequently brutal. After three years, however, the beatings and torture became less frequent. During the last year, we were allowed outside most days for a couple of minutes to bathe. We showered by drawing water from a concrete tank with a homemade bucket. One day, as we all stood by the tank, stripped of our clothes, a young naval pilot named Mike Christian found the remnants of a handkerchief in a gutter that ran under the prison wall. Mike managed to sneak the grimy rag into our cell and began fashioning it into a flag... He made red and blue from ground-up roof tiles and tiny amounts of ink and painted the colors onto the cloth with watery rice glue. Using thread from his own blanket and a homemade bamboo needle, he sewed on stars. Early in the morning a few days later, when the guards were not alert, he whispered loudly from the back of our cell, ‘Hey gang, look here!’ He proudly held up this tattered piece of cloth, waving it, as if in a breeze... When he raised that smudgy fabric, we automatically stood straight and saluted, our chests puffing out, and more than a few eyes had tears... Now, whenever I see the flag, I think of Mike and the morning he first waved that tattered emblem of a nation. It was then, thousands of miles from home in a lonely prison cell that he showed us what it is to be truly free.” —Medal of Honor recipient Leo K. Thorsness

Of our three national holidays, for me, Memorial Day is the most significant. It’s the blood and guts (the suffering and sacrifice) symbolized by Memorial Day, that made America possible. To make ideals real—and to protect and preserve them—requires payment in the coin of strife and death... If I could speak with my lost marines today, I’d ask: ‘Are you happy with what your country has become? When you were a nervous kid waiting to make that first helo jump while bullets whispered by your ear, the bile sits in your throat and the wind whips your face, did you ever imagine it would come to this?”
Semper Fi, Buddha Bill, USMC
 

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