I’m writing this on the 250th Birthday of the Unites States of America. What a milestone this day is in our Nation’s history!
I hope you enjoyed celebrating America’s Birthday in your own way wherever you were today, and that you spent some time reflecting on the meaning of freedom and service. This was a day to especially recall that we all “pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” In the current climate of social and political unrest, divisiveness, and polarization in our Nation, we would do well to remember that commitment, the oaths of enlistment or commissioning that most of us swore in our military service, and the values that unite us. Remember the caution that Benjamin Franklin gave in 1787 in response to a question from a citizen about what kind of government we have: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Putting together this August issue of The Watch was an especially emotional experience for me that began with the story of Elias Hernandez’s return to Europe this Summer. The deep meaning and impact of that event on so many grateful people, old and young, in that part of the world was reflected in the photos and the reports that came regularly for several days on Facebook. What I can’t share in our pages, of course, were the video clips. Most striking to me was one short clip of Eli being pushed in his wheelchair along a row of crosses in a French cemetery with hundreds of such tombstones of American WWII Soldiers. As he passed each cross, Eli reached out to briefly touch the top of it, one after another, as if to say in his silent gesture to each of those fallen, “I was with you. I remember you. Good job, brother. You are not forgotten.”
It led me to think of others of that “Greatest Generation” who sacrificed so much in that world-wide conflagration more than 80 years ago. Names come to my mind like John Shirley, Maurice Weis, Bill Pool, O.W. Byrd, Frank Taverni, Buford Blount II, Ed Krekorian, Emilio Aguirre, Philip Larrimore, Paul Osborne, Mike Spanovich, Charlie Updike, Jim Looby, Hubert Kleiboeker. So many more of your fathers or uncles or grandfathers were there, too. My dad, Louis Blissett, was there, in the 3rd Inf Div and then the 63rd Inf Div; he would have turned 104 years old on the day Eli Hernandez left on his Honor Flight trip. In a sense, my father, like Eli, was there with every one of those men more than 80 years ago. All of them were there together, serving and sacrificing and some dying. Not necessarily at the same time, of course. Not all personally knowing each other in combat. But all together in spirit and common purpose, a generation of American fighters united to save the world when the world was on fire.
I admit this will be considered by many to be but a hopeless dream, but I hold onto it: In honor of our 250th Birthday, may we wake up to recognize the foolishness and danger of the internal divisiveness and polarization in our Country and unite as a nation committed once again to being a beacon of hope and stability throughout the world to avert such devastation again. We owe that to those of the Greatest Generation who fought for America and her Allies.
Rock of the Marne!
Bill Blissett