Pearl Harbor Day...
We journeyed to Fredericksburg on Friday to meet with my good friend Joe Galloway who was the featured speaker at the Admiral Nimitz Museum. He was speaking at the Pearl Harbor Day Memorial there. What a great time, such a good time in fact, that we ditched our plans to stay only one evening in favor of an all weekend affair. You can read the details in the Sunday entry of my travel partners website The Yellow Bug News. I hadn't seen Joe since March at the movie premier of We Were Soldiers but this time we really had some time together to catch up, relax, eat and tell stories. And Julie got to meet the fabled, "Famous Author".
Joe's remarks in front of the large crowd, including many Pearl Harbor survivors, were to the point. We owe the WWII generation so much, we owe them almost everything that America is today. And we need to show that honor, so many are leaving us every day. Joe told us what it was like to be a kid in the war years with almost every single male family member being gone to some strange spot on the globe. Not knowing whether they were alive or dead on a daily basis. And he reminded us of what they accomplished when they came back...mostly without much talk about what they had done while the were gone. Unlike today when every little deed qualifies one for hero status. These men and women, knew that they had done a job that needed to be done for our freedom. They came home, and went about doing the next job, building the America that we know today.
My dad was like that. Gone for three years of hell and heartbreak, and then not talking much about it for the next 50 years. Only in the past several years has he filled in some of the details of his life in combat in Italy. The agony of seeing his one and only good friend killed the very first day in combat, and of the misery of fighting in freezing weather in the Italian Alps with German artillery falling through the trees for days. We need to remember these people and to thank them. We need to remember that they went through some very hard times and made America better for it.
