President George W. Bush at the Tomb of the Unknowns, May 28, 2007Posted on 05/23/2008 9:27:54 AM PDT by Elvina
"My son died with honor.”
These words struck this writer like a bolt from the blue. Captured by a television news crew, they were spoken with quiet dignity by Johnny Spann to reporters at the front gate of his home in Winfield, Alabama, upon learning of the death of his son, Johnny Mike Spann, the first American to die on a foreign field of battle in the War on Islamic Terror. Mike, as he was known to his friends and family, was killed on November 25, 2001, during a combined al-Qaeda–Taliban uprising at a temporary prison in Qala-i Jangi, not far from the town of Mazar-e Sharif in Northern Afghanistan. He was 32 years old. He is survived by his wife, Shannon, and three young children.
The words of Johnny Spann were so striking because they immediately recalled an earlier heroic age, one that apparently had been subsumed by the zeitgeist of our own cynical, self-absorbed, postmodern era. But the American spirit had never been extinguished. It reemerged instantaneously on September 11, embodied by the raw courage of the firemen, police, and emergency workers in New York City, the men and women on Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the rescuers at the Pentagon in northern Virginia, and the thousands of Americans in all three locations who looked death in the eye. On display for the world to witness was the valor woven into the very core of a free people. It was this moral code that inspired Mike Spann to do his duty on a remote desert plain thousands of miles from home.
President George W. Bush at the Tomb of the Unknowns, May 28, 2007I will never forget Spann’s father refusing to shake hands with the father of John Walker Lindh, aka The American Taliban.
God Bless Shannon Spann and all of the Spann family and God Bless all of our troops and their families
This is the reply from Spann’s father to American Taliban’s father...
http://www.honormikespann.org/pdfs/flindh_retort_feb2006.pdf
Curse the Lindh family
Whoopw! I forgot to show this was an excerpt so people could read the rest.
Link here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWUzMzJiMTUxYzhhODlmMDA1OTgwMTYwZTQzZjkyMzE=
Whoopw! I forgot to show this was an excerpt so people could read the rest.
Link here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWUzMzJiMTUxYzhhODlmMDA1OTgwMTYwZTQzZjkyMzE=
Every time we see what some Americans have become, he is a shining example of what other Americans are, and gives us hope for the future.
Here’s hoping more than a few reflect upon the sacrifice.
A special request for NYFreepers: This is Fleet Week! Please do what you can for visiting Marines and sailors even if have to go looking for them. Oh, and shake their hands for me.
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