Remembering America’s Incredible Heroes
In which we offer for Memorial Day a sampler of editorials about those who rose to glory.
The honorees the base renaming commission has come up with are so admirable that it’s hard not to savor the idea of bringing in some new names for our most famous forts.
On the morning of the day he died, it has been said of a few individuals over the years, he was the greatest man alive, and among Americans this could well be said of Admiral James Stockdale.
Jeremiah Denton will be remembered this day by hundreds of thousands, many of whom will watch the video of him — as a prisoner of war in Hanoi — secretly alerting American intelligence to communist war crimes.
Colonel George ‘Bud’ Day was leading a group of POWs in forbidden Christian prayer when a North Vietnamese jailor burst in and put a rifle to Misty’s forehead. He started singing the Star Spangled Banner.
In which ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ is taken to a new level.
‘Let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds and care for him who shall have borne the battle,’ said President Biden, quoting Lincoln, as he prepared to bestow the Medal of Honor on Colonel Paris Davis, who 58 years earlier, in the thick of an attack by the Viet Cong, had stayed behind to save, among others, a wounded medic. Asked the wounded soldier: “Am I going to die?” Replied Davis: “Not before me.”
One of the astonishing things about World War I is that for generations to come we will be able to hear it end — which happened on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th month, 1918. And then? Listen closely . . .
