Happy Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was originally called. Thanks to everyone here who served in any form or fashion. We all know Freedom has a steep price, so thank you again to those who have lost their lives or lives of their loved ones in the sacrifice for freedom.
My dad was in the Battle of the Buldge with Patton's 3rd and my uncle BB Morel was at Tarawa in the Pacific. They both returned a little physically and mentally scared but lived a long life. They were lucky many many more were not, we need to remember and be thankful
Great (maybe another Great) Grandfather on my mother's side of family. Enlisted at 16, drummer boy, wounded at Gettysburg, walked home to Salisbury, NC.
James A. Garfield (1831–81), Ohio congressman, later the 20th president of the United States, in the first annual address at Arlington National Cemetery, May 30, 1868: "I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. For the noblest man that lives, there still remains a conflict. He must still withstand the assaults of time and fortune, must still be assailed with temptations, before which lofty natures have fallen; but with these the conflict ended, the victory was won, when death stamped on them the great seal of heroic character, and closed a record which years can never blot."
