Memorial Day 2009 is a Solemn Occasion

On Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend, my family and I gather at a small rural cemetery on a windswept hillside, surrounded by rich Iowa farmland, as the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars honors the men buried there who served in all of America's wars, from the War of 1812 to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

An aging VFW honor guard provides a 21-gun salute, followed by a lone bugler playing Taps. Some of the men being honored there were teenagers when they lost their lives in battle. Some came home to raise families and grow old in that community, or perhaps they settled there after their war years to start a whole new life. Still others migrated elsewhere before returning home to live out their final years and be buried in that little cemetery.

Whatever their circumstances, they are remembered each Memorial Day at this brief ceremony. Among the names of those who served in World War I is that of my maternal grandfather. He and my grandmother settled there in the 1930s and made the community their home. They are buried together in that little cemetery.

For the past ten years, my father's name has been among the interred who served in World War II. As a 22-year-old NCO on Eisenhower's staff during the planning for D-Day, only a freak accident resulting in a broken ankle kept him from sailing across the English Channel on June 6, 1944, with the rest of the invasion force. Like most WWII vets, he never talked much about his wartime experiences, but he did tell us about that one, and I believe it always haunted him that the young man who took his place that day was one of the first to fall on Omaha Beach.

Until this year, I had always viewed this special Memorial Day ceremony as a celebration of the lives of ordinary men who rose to the occasion in the worst of times to do extraordinary things. This year, I felt a sense of sadness and resentment for those men, because their country is now led by a man who believes that America is an arrogant nation that needs to apologize to the rest of the world.

From the bloody, mustard gas poisoned battlefields of World War I to the beaches of Normandy, from the freezing cold of Korea to the rice paddies of Vietnam, from the deserts of Iraq to the mountains of Afghanistan, these brave men set aside their own personal hopes, dreams, goals and lives to serve us when we needed them most. They fought for an ideal this president cannot even fathom and about which he apparently cares nothing.

I hear people say, "He's not one of us," almost as if he's a space alien. I know what they mean, and I agree. He is not a loyal, patriotic American, and I am tired of pretending he is anything other than an underprepared, slick-talking Marxist. He is a radical ideologue whose worldview is global and whose loyalties lie somewhere other than with the nation that has given him so much.

I miss my father. I wish he had lived beyond the mere 76 years he was given. Hardly a day has passed in the last ten years that I have not wished that I could ask him the questions I failed to ask when I thought I had another year or another month with him, or to tell him how much I appreciate the sacrifice he and his generation made to preserve my freedom.

But when I see the President of the United States travel to Europe and refuse to go to a U.S. military cemetery in France - even at the invitation of the French president - I am glad my father did not live to see it. When I see my president stand before crowds of Europeans, all of whom, without the intervention of my country - twice in one century - would be speaking German today, I am ashamed for the honor of my father and my grandfather.

May God grant us the endurance and the fortitude to stand against the evil of this president's ideology and agenda, and the wisdom to replace him with the next true patriot who runs for that office.