Joseph A. Rehyansky
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32181
06/08/2009
D-Day + 20. Years, that is. CBS ran a one-hour special hosted by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It would be his last trip to the Normandy beaches that his troops captured at such terrible cost. Only one memory lingers: Ike waved his hand over a big stretch of beach. “Here, you could hardly find sand to walk on for the American dead D-Day + 40. President Ronald Reagan addressed veterans of the invasion at the place where it began. He spoke of the valor of the Rangers, boys mostly, who scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. There were 225 of them at dawn. The next day 90 were fit to bear arms. He asked them: “Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief. It was loyalty and love.” His entire speech (Below-must read) is still worth reading.
D-Day + 50. What I most clearly remember is a photo of our draft-dodging Philanderer-in-Chief walking along that beach, head down, looking thoughtful and contemplative as only the most brilliant and insightful of men can. One wag superimposed a thought bubble over his head: “I’m sure glad it wasn’t me over here getting my butt shot off.”
D-Day + 60. At Omaha Beach President George W. Bush quoted Gen. Omar Bradley: “Six hours after the landings, we held only 10 yards of beach.” He also quoted from the diary of a Dutch girl who would turn 15 only six days later. She greeted news of the invasion with these words: “It still seems too wonderful, like a fairy tale...I may yet be able to go back to school in September or October.” She never made it back to school. Anne Frank died at Bergen Belsen on a date uncertain in early March 1945, barely two months before the Germans surrendered.
D-Day + 65. Their numbers are dwindling, but former Second Lieutenant Bob Dole was there. Our Apologist-in-Chief is concluding another triumphant tour, breast-beating and genuflecting all the way. He probably goes through kneepads faster than an NBA starter. But you’ve got to give the man credit. He never misses an opportunity to peddle his squishy pabulum, his deviant views of the world we live in, and his apparent desire to retire from office in 2017 to a rousing universal chorus of Kumbaya. “We live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true. It’s a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government...The nations that joined together to defeat Hitler’s reich were not perfect. They made their share of mistakes, had not always agreed with one another on every issue. But whatever God we prayed to...we knew that the evil we faced had to be stopped.”
“[W]hatever God we prayed to...” Now what do you suppose he could have meant by that? Whom do you think he was talking to in his uniquely reassuring and condescending tone? And while we’re at it, how did I -- philistine that I must be -- overlook for almost 63 years the indispensable contribution to the overthrow of tyranny by those of our brothers so deeply committed to freedom and equality, the Nations of Islam?
“[C]laims about what is true.” If he was only talking about determining the truths, if any there are, in organized religion I would agree with him. But do you have the same hunch I do? He’s talking moral equivalence here, the delusions fostered by John le Carre and his cohort: the KGB and the CIA are brothers under the skin. Strangling your daughter because she wants to divorce the husband you forced her to marry is alien to our own beliefs, to be sure, but it’s a cultural difference, you see. Slowly hacking off the head of a helpless hostage is not acceptable, but we’ve been guilty of our own provocations, right? Just take a look at those terrible photos from Abu Ghraib, where the minor delicts of three or four low-level borderline morons were used to justify claims that our entire effort in Iraq is morally corrupt. The truth, objective reality if you will, is something to be determined, not endlessly debated by those whose level of tolerance for “competing beliefs” borders on the suicidal.
Granted, D-Day observances are not an occasion for jingoistic nationalism as the effort involved several nations. It was truly an Allied effort. But it took more than blood, treasure, and guns to demolish Fortress Europa. An unshakable belief in the superiority of Western Civilization as defined by the best that the Judaeo-Christian tradition teaches us was essential. In the words of Winston Churchill, we had to recover our “moral health and martial vigour...arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time.” It was a job for warriors sprung from freedom, not milquetoasts debating “what is true.” Obama’s speech was what one would expect from someone who is, in the words of a top advisor to Hillary Clinton, “not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”
Neither did our President cover himself with glory the day before, when he visited Buchenwald and said that it made him think of the “cruelty in ourselves.”
His obvious reference was to our country’s use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques, which he courageously disavowed yet again for the umptyninth time in Cairo. Never mind that the Brooklyn Bridge is probably still standing and 10,000 rush-hour commuters are still alive because we waterboarded the right guy.
War scrapes men raw in ways beyond the physical. What is left when the millstone grinds away all pretense is what we are. I have served among young Americans at war and never saw a Vietnamese mistreated. Once I saw one spoken to harshly by a captain who decided that this 60-something-year-old man was a Viet Cong suspect. The captain was an idiot. None of us much liked the Vietnamese. It wasn’t merely because their culture is as alien to ours as one that might have evolved in the Alpha Centauri system. We were stuck there because of them. Yet instead of “the cruelty in ourselves,” I saw GIs toss extra C-rations to the Vietnamese who lined the roads during our mounted convoys; spare change given to the children of our hooch maids; random acts of simple kindness every day.
Many of us have seen the photo on the dustcover of Michael Yon’s Moment of Truth in Iraq. It gives us a more contemporary glimpse of “the cruelty in ourselves.” A U.S. Army major, under fire, is hustling an Iraqi baby girl badly wounded by a terrorist RPG to his medic. Despite his bravery the child died.
No one’s ever accused me of Pollyannaism but if I had to choose between the world views espoused by our posturing President or those of the Dutch girl who died of typhus at 15 in the hell of a Nazi concentration camp, I would choose Anne Frank’s.
One of her diary entries reads: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Mr. Rehyansky is retired from the U.S. Army and the Chattanooga, Tennessee, District Attorney's office and now serves as a part-time County Magistrate. He is a former contributor to National Review, and his writings have appeared in The American Spectator and other publications.
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Reagan at Point Du Hoc
by Human Events
06/06/2009
We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.
The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers--the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. T wo hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.
Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.
These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.
Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your "lives fought for life...and left the vivid air signed with your honor.''
I think I know what you may be thinking right now--thinking, "We were just part of a bigger effort; everyone was brave that day.'' Well, everyone was. Do you remember the story of Bill Millin of the 51st Highlanders? Forty years ago today, British troops were pinned down near a bridge, waiting desperately for help. Suddenly, they heard the sound of bagpipes, and some thought they were dreaming. Well, they weren't. They looked up and saw Bill Millin with his bagpipes, leading the reinforcements and ignoring the smack of the bullets into the ground around him.
Lord Lovat was with him--Lord Lovat of Scotland, who calmly announced when he got to the bridge, "Sorry I'm a few minutes late,'' as if he'd been delayed by a traffic jam, when in truth he'd just come from the bloody fighting on Sword Beach, which he and his men had just taken.
There was the impossible valor of the Poles who threw themselves between the enemy and the rest of Europe as the invasion took hold, and the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred. And once they hit Juno Beach, they never looked back.
All of these men were part of a rollcall of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland's 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England's armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard's "Matchbox Fleet'' and you, the American Rangers.
Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.
The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge--and pray God we have not lost it--that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.
You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.
The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They thought--or felt in their hearts, though they couldn't know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.
Something else helped the men of D-Day: their rock-hard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we're about to do. Also that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.''
These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies.
When the war was over, there were lives to be rebuilt and governments to be returned to the people. There were nations to be reborn. Above all, there was a new peace to be assured. These were huge and daunting tasks. But the Allies summoned strength from the faith, belief, loyalty, and love of those who fell here. They rebuilt a new Europe together.
There was first a great reconciliation among those who had been enemies, all of whom had suffered so greatly. The United States did its part, creating the Marshall Plan to help rebuild our allies and our former enemies. The Marshall Plan led to the Atlantic alliance--a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.
In spite of our great efforts and successes, not all that followed the end of the war was happy or planned. Some liberated countries were lost. The great sadness of this loss echoes down to our own time in the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They're still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war. Because of this, Allied forces still stand on this continent. Today, as 40 years ago, our armies are here for only one purpose--to protect and defend democracy. The only territories we hold are memorials like this one and graveyards where our heroes rest.
We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.
But we try always to be prepared for peace; prepared to deter aggression; prepared to negotiate the reduction of arms; and, yes, prepared to reach out again in the spirit of reconciliation. In truth, there is no reconciliation we would welcome more than a reconciliation with the Soviet Union, so, together, we can lessen the risks of war, now and forever.
It's fitting to remember here the great losses also suffered by the Russian people during World War II: 20 million perished, a terrible price that testifies to all the world the necessity of ending war. I tell you from my heart that we, in the United States, do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the Earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action.
We will pray forever that some day that changing will come. But for now, particularly today, it is good and fitting to renew our commitment to each other, to our freedom, and to the alliance that protects it.
We are bound today by what bound us 40 years ago, the same loyalties, traditions, and beliefs. We're bound by reality. The strength of America's allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe's democracies. We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.
Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.''
Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their value [valor], and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.
Thank you very much, and God bless you all.
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