Memorial Day
As we enjoy this long weekend just before launching into full summer mode, I would hope that everyone in the land of the free and the home of the brave will remember to pause a moment and say a prayer of thanks for all the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedoms we all enjoy today.
If I have learned anything for sure in this life, it is that Freedom is not Free. No one has to travel far to find a cemetery with ample proof of soldiers who have fallen while fighting to preserve the most precious possession that any of us will ever have. Let us not forget to honor those who paid the ultimate price for us.
I will never forget Tony O'Neal who went to elementary school with me and at age eleven, played on an opposing Little League team. Every now and then I pass by the old baseball field in a neighboring community and I always glance over across the railroad tracks to see the old ball field, and I see his freckled face as he is tagging me out as I slide into second base. He was going to a different school then and I think that was the last time I ever saw him.
Little could anyone have imagined on that humid Georgia summer night in 1960, that Tony had already lived over half his life at the tender age of eleven. Only nine years later, in October, 1969, he stepped on a land mine in Viet Nam, just a few days short of his 21st birthday. His final resting place is only a few minutes away from that old red clay ball field.
And then there was the courageous and selfless Milton Olive III, a youth of only eighteen from Chicago, who threw his body over a live grenade in the jungles of Viet Nam, taking the full force of the explosion to save his platoon. He was not even old enough to be called a man, not old enough to vote, not old enough to buy
a beer, but he was old enough to die and courageous enough to sacrifice his life for the lives of his comrades.
Milton Olive III
Going back a generation, there was my dear Aunt Sarah's brother, Pat Mathews, whose plane went down in WWII, and whose body was never found. His thanks is that most of us in our generation never knew he even existed.
Unfortunately these are not the only ones who paid the ultimate price and who are easily forgotten. There were many other wars and many other generations. The numbers of those in all the wars who have perished for our freedoms are endless but these numbers pale in comparison to the immeasurable hopes and dreams which perished with them. Each had a name, a face, a personality, a family who loved them and whom they loved, and a hope for a future which they were denied. Please remember them this day.
