Posted on 07/04/2008 9:08:51 PM PDT by johnwcassell
On July 3rd I went to the local Walgreen's. While standing in the shade out front I was passed by an elderly gentleman on his way inside. I thought I saw the words "Bomb Group" accross the pocket of his polo shirt. So when he came out I stopped him. The shirt said "440th Bomb Group".
"World War II?" I asked.
"Yes!" He smiled.
I shook his hand, adding sadly "the last one we won".
"The last one we tried to win."
"Amen, Brother." As I watched him go out of sight my mind was on the 56,000 who never came back from Vietnam, cause they were the guys I served with. But then there were a bunch from Korea. There are also the best of today's younger generation in Iraq and Afghanistan. My daughter served two deployments with them.
When they are my age I wonder which of the two legacies will be theirs.
In my lifetime things have gotten very confusing. My generation grew up in the triumphal backwash of World War II. My dad was in the first wave at Omaha...one of the many, many veterans who had come home after vanquishing genocidal dictatorships in both Europe and Asia. An estimated twenty million died...twelve million in Hitler's concentration camps alone.
We were well aware of that horror. Not only did our neighborhood have several people who wore the tatoos, but on television, in movie theaters, in sermons and elsewhere we were constantly reminded of Man's Inhumanity to Man. Every now and then Simon Wiesenthal's Nazi Hunters would nab a war criminal...and we would get an individualized reminder of what seemingly normal people were able to do to their fellow humans without any loss of sleep.
I watched Adolf Eichmann's trial in the Israeli Supreme Court. In addition to his part in the mass genocide, he was also on trial for personally killing a starving Jewish boy trying to get peaches from a tree. Of course I heard many stories from our neighbors. The lady who lived upstairs lost her son. He was trying to flee the Holocaust with only a Crucifix as protection. She told of his being seized at a Gestapo roadblock. "They wouldn't believe him," she said in her halting English as a tear came to her eye.
My doctor was in the Medical Corps during the War. When his unit was captured he went to a concentration camp...not a POW camp. He was a Jew. He had copies of the photos taken by the forces liberating his camp. He was a skeleton.
The purpose of these reminders was to prevent it from ever happening again.
Last month, the UK Minister of Education decreed that British children would no longer be taught about the Holocaust.
The subject is "offensive to Muslims" and so must be dropped.
Mind you it wasn't the terrorists who were being placated. It was the so-called "Good Muslims".
Why is the Holocaust offensive to "good Muslims"? Somebody had better tell me because I don't believe it. If it indeed IS offensive....should we care?
What about Jews, Slavs, Catholics, gypsies and gays...to name a few. They were the ones who suffered it. Shouldn't we care more about whether they are offended?
Are we next to take this maniacal point of view?
In Korea and Vietnam we sent our men out to fight and if necessary die in wars we did not intend to win. What kind of madness was that? What kind of MADNESS?
Strange things are happening in Western Civilization these days. Two very opposite and clear legacies are on the board. What are we the American People going to insist be our legacy?
It did my heart good to meet and talk to my bomber crew friend at Walgreen's yesterday. It comforted me to know there are still millions like him in this Land of ours. I know what legacy he would choose...me too....
John W. Cassell
John W. Cassell is the author of seven novels of life during the American Cultural Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, including Soldier of Aquarius: 1969-1970 . One of his books, Crossroads: 1969 is featured in this year's publication of the Arts on the Underground Foundation in London, UK.
Cassell retired in 2006 from a career in law enforcement spanning from 1971. He has since been a frequent contributor to the Amazon Connect Blog and has published several guest editorials in Israel National News.
Amen, friends.
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