Newspapers / The Brunswick Beacon (Shallotte, … / May 26, 1994, edition 1 / Page 4
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1 i m 1 " I . . . . , tfwHaiM f MUW1 ,1 ? -' ^ 'Mr CecdtkOore ai imi>M ?lynii<nttiii| Dorothy Brennan and Brenda Ctemmons Moore ..Graphic Artists ????? LonnJe Sprinkle .Assismnr Pressman PAGC 4 -A, THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1994 QUEST EDITORIAL Cc a awa ?? A mn'+ a %? wi ? ? Only Way To Honor Our Fallen Heroes BY BRUCE THIESEN They said goodbye to their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and went off to war. They hugged their children tight, and kissed sweethearts one last time with a sense of the great longing that was to come. They iefi uie towns ana cities ana farms where they had been born and raised. They left schools and jobs, hopes srKi dreams, careers ana callings. And they went off to war. They said they'd return. And everyone hoped and worked and prayed for that day. But they never came home again. The remains of many were returned to rest beneath the green grass of a thousand cemeteries in a thousand cities and towns across this great land. Some were buried where they fell, far from home. Thousands more fill the sprawling cemeteries overseas. And the great oceans have swallowed the crews of a vast armada. The fate of untold numbers is known but to God. Each Memorial Day we honor the memory of those men and women who went off to war, never to return. Our nation owes its very existence to those who answered the call to duty. Thomas Jefferson said: "The ground of liberty must be gained by inches." Yes, by inches, and the lives of those who fought for liberty's hallowed ground. More than 6,000 patriots died in battle during the American Revolution. Who will honor their sacrifice if not those of us who are blessed to call America our home? The Civil War, which tore this nation apart, has since bound us together with the strength of a common history that we might not otherwise have had. We lost 500,000 ? North and South ? in thai war. In World War 1, 116,000 lost their lives in service to America. Who will cherish their rr.crr.cry and mourn this loss if uui ail Americans who love this country? World War II saw 400,000 servicemen and women lose their lives. Then came Korea, Vietnam and, more recently, Desert Storm. And we must not forget those who have died in our latest peace-keeping missions. in ail, more t?sn one million Auiencaus have uicu in war since our country was founded. Who will remember those who gave the last foil measure of devotion to the cause of justice, free dom and democracy if not those who live under the protections of these great principles? All Americans ? "We The People" ? must remember what they fought for. We the people must cherish their memory and honor their sacrifice. Memorial Day ceremonies are not the only way to honor our fallen heroes. Whenever we show respect for the American Flag, we honor our war umu. Wueucvei we vote, we confirm ihe democracy they died for. Whenever we exercise our freedoms of speech and to peaceably assemble, we honor their sacrifice. Whenever we gather in places of worship, we are blessed by this greatest of freedoms which they fought to protect. To the young people who may read this, I want you to know that those we honor on Memorial Day did not die because they loved war. They did not They loved the peace and freedom that is our American hcri!s?s. As General Douglas Mac Arthur said: "The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." Thus, America's war veterans and our fallen comrades be queath this heritage to our children and future generations: A free and just country unlike any other in world history. Soon, their young hands will steer the course that America will take into the 21st century. No doubt they too will face trou bled times and crises from within and without. No doubt there will be wars and rumors of wars. But America will remain strong if our young people step into the future girded with the knowledge of our country's proud his tory. On Memorial Day, with grateful hearts we honor those who selflessly gave all they had to give. They died for their country, for their friends and families, and for you and me. Let us thank God for America. Let us thank God for those patriots who went off to war. And let us never forget those who did not return. Bruce Thiesen is national commander of the American Legion. THIESEN Worth Repeating... ? In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row. ? John McCrae ? The legitimate object of war is a more perfect peace. ? William Tecumseh Sherman Picking Up The Pieces Of Childhood "Cute kid, huh?" Eric asked as he showed me a child's portrait in a Sunday paper, his hand covering the t- - - Jl' "Umhum," I agreed, momentarily < distracted from Calvin and Hobbes. "Eleven years old," he said. "Held up a woman at an automatic teller machine. She was shot in the head with a .22. Killed." It happened in Detroit. Jacob Gonzaies, ii, and his i4-year-oia drug-dealer accomplice held up Elizabeth Aivarez, a pregnant moth er of three, at an automatic teller machine Jacob didn't do the shooting, but he signaled to his accomplice thai this was a good victim. His take was 20 bucks. He spent it on a chili dog and some Batman toys and was ar rested the next morning. He pleaded JUaity tO uTmiCu lOubviy auu Wd3 sentenced to the maximum term, to remain in state custody until he's 21. He told a New York Tunes re porter, "It was a game, right?" Forget the babyboomers. Say a little prayer for Generation X. And hope you go to heaven before the next crop takes charge. It used to be an urban problem, this violence among tfte young. As the Tunes reporter put it, "A genera tion cf children born to teenage mothers is coming of age in neigh borhoods already weakened by the addictive power of crack and the de structive force of drug ucucfi." Maybe that's the point. Or is it just a pixei in a bigger, even more disturbing picture? As the article pointed out: r Lynn Carlson ? Last summer in amuent subur ban Dun woody, Ga., three white icc lis wcni iu iik tnjtuc of * uaauicu man they knew, tied him in his wheelchair and tortured hins for more than 12 hours before stabbing and ciubbing him iu ucwii. ? In rural Indiana, three white teenage girts lured a 12-year-old girl into a car, then beat and stabbed her before burning her alive. ? In Davcnpufi, Iowa, three while teenage boys were recently convict cd of shooting to death a 17-year-old giri when she refused to let them use her Ford Escort for ? robbery. It all gave me a chill and remind ed me of a conversation I had a cou ple of weeks ago with Cassandra Gray at Brunswick Shores, the ado lescent psychiatric unit of The Brunswick Hospital. What's the common denominator, I ki?r in *11 |rj/le ynii work with? Dysfunctional families, she an swered without hesitation. ! hate that term. In my mind it conjures lip images of had guv* who wrap their victimhood about them like a magical cloak to protect them from the same kind of pain they've inflicted on others. Of whine rs who need an excuse to keep from getting their act together. Ucuuca, I've nUuiiiaincd -ii-rnV- ! first heard the term, the only fami lies that function arc on Nickel odeon. But Cassandra and her colleagues who pick up the pieces of shattered childhood can't turn their heads from the big picture like the rest of us often do. With a combination of street wisdom and idealism, she makes uacSc wacf* miv>uS. Many children these days have re al behavioral problem? ? not just what our parents used to roll their eyes uwi call a rcucniuus naiuic Or a bad attitude. Lots of ordinary kids feel unloved and neglected in the scheme of their parents' break-neck lives. They lack the basic skills to cope with life's inevitable stresses or to make decisions in their own best interests. We don't make enough time for our kids ? not just we their parents, but we their teachers and coaches and relatives and next door neigh bors. As much as we may regret it, most of us moms and dads must be at work instead of in the kitchen when the kids get out of school. As much as we may hate it, many of us don't or can't turn to our extended families for the traditional blood-kin support that has sustained many generations, some Kind of alterna tive support system must evolve. "Quality tin*'* is bull You am't make a child fee! more secure by taking him to Wally World for one week every couple of years, but you can by sitting down to dinner with him at night and talking about his day, every day. You can by teaching as: h-~? to ?h the car or atd a fish, but only if you can manage to do it without belittling her. Most of us don't know how to lis ten to adolescents, to scparaic the strands of melodrama, fiear, confu sion and emotional intensity that are woven into their psyches. Vfc'rc too quick to offer s simplistic sciatica, or to make light of little problems ili?u ?ic so very Soigc to s young per son. And too often we don't pay atten tion to the signs when something is going icifibiy wrong With CiUiuicA until something terrible happens. By the time Cassandra gets them at age 14 or IS, a lot of damage has been done ? sometimes way beyond what l he available imic, muiicy oTau Oihci resources can repair. But she and others like her keep trying, at least until the frustration of it all burns them out. If these gnarly truths are painful to us married, middle-class, middle age, Sunday-schooled, gainfully em ployed parents, I wonder, then what do they mean to a single, teenage, unskilled, addicted parent from a vi olent home? A mother like Jacob Gonzales had before the State of Michigan became his surrogate par ent. I don't have an answer. Nor, it seems, OO much bigger hearts iau minds. \V= ess t all tffi u sntc Ozzy and Harriett, and I'm pretty sure I wouiun'i want to be like either one of them. But something's got to change. Go, jf J face ihe state to live up to it's /Vfrutae near m? neWitwh?^7 7 T hope!! i I 13ARMU&& iffl gam cittaem 50 Years Later, It Remains The Longest Day If war is hell, as Gen. William T. Sherman reminded us, then June 6, 1944 must have been one hell ot a day. It was D-Day. Decision Day. The first day of the long-awaited libera tion of Europe, when the greatest ar mada in history ? more than 5,000 ships cany in g 370,000 soldiers and sailors ? steamed across the English Channel toward the beaches of Normandy. Now SO years lster. it is difficult to imagine bow Gea. Ds/igh! Risen hower must have felt on the eve of the invasion, with 1,100 allied camps strung across the entire sou thern coast of England, each burst ing with tons of equipment and thousands of impatient soldiers awaiting the signal to move. Imagine staring outside at the worst June weather in 20 years, lis tening to forecasters say there -might" be a 36-hour break in the ?quaiis and having to decide whe ther to risk a chance for victory to morrow or to wait another month for the right moon phase and tide condi tions. Or imagine being one of the para troopers floating down from the pitch-black skies over France a few hours later. The battle plan called for you to land in the fields outside Ste Mere-Eglise to regroup with your unit and move into the city. Instead you feel the wind wafting you toward the very middle of towr. You look down helplessly at the German guns flashing and the limp bodies of your comrades dangling from parachutes caught on light poles and church steeples. Imagine riding a landing craft through the high surf and the gey sers of artillery explosions toward the killing fields of Omaha Beach. You have been aboard a ship for Eric Carlson days, waiting for the weather to im prove. But it hasn't. Mow you snd your fellow G.J.s are seasick, soaked to the bone, splattered with each other's vomit and packed like pickles into a (bare ly) floating shoe box. You are wait ing for a big steel door at the end to fall so you can ran headloog into that spray of flying lead clanging against the hull. The door drops. You follow the others off the end. But not onto a dry sand beach. Instead you find your self chest-deep is water and 100 yards feom the nearest cover with machine-gun bullets splashing all around you. Some of your buddies are crip pled by the pitching ramp as the landing craft rides forward on the waves. Others disappear in a red mist as their burden of ammunition explodes. Many more simply stop moving and slip beneath the foam. Seventeen landing craft loaded with more than 1,000 men sank in the surf off Normandy that day. In just 10 minutes of fighting on Omaha Beach, a single company of 205 soldiers saw 197 killed or wounded. Half of the men in the first wave became casualties as more than 2,000 Americans died. And that was on just one of the five landing areas. But somehow the invasion worked. About 155,000 men came ashore in the first 24 hours. Once re cured, the beaches were transformed into a massive loading zone, where an endless stream of trucks brought suppiics and reimorcements tor tfte advancing troops. And advance they did, from field to field, from hedge-row to hedge row, from town to town, ail the way to Paris in less than three months. If D-Day had failed, it would have taken the allies years to mount jnnrtwr ?nmll oivino Hw flf inmw time to develop their deadly mirsilr program and to perfect their new crop of jet fighter planes. Instead, the invasion act the stage for victory in Europe and the end of the Nazi The coming week of D-Day an niversary observances reminds us that it may be difficult, but some times necessary for America to go to war. While we may argue endlessly about our involvements in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama or Iraq, no one with any sense could dispute the necessity of fighting to stop Adoiph Hitler As a child, I devoured books about about the two world wars and the valiant warriors who fought them. One of my favorites was "The Longest Day," by Cornelius Ryan, an incredibly detailed account of the D-Day invasion (aad the longest book I had read at the time). It described the amazing logistical feat of assembling the massive inva sion force and the cat-and-mouse es pionage game of keeping endeavor secret. it revealed some of the clever de ceptive tactics used by the allien ? like dropping thousand* of dummy paratroopers (nicknamed "Ruperts") behind enemy lines to create a diver sion for the airborne assaults. It told how the paratroopers were given little toy clickers called A "crickets" to identify friends or foes during the inevitable confusion fol lowing a night-time parachute droo. One dick was to be answered by two clicks. It landed me on the beach at Poinie du Hoc with Army Rangers as they fired grappling hooks to the top of sheer limestone cliffs and used ropes to scale the vertical walls as the Germans lobbed grenades on them from above. IV drama nf >nssssss!i! story was Uict punrayea in a three hour, Academy Award- winning mo vie of The Longest Day," for which Ryan also wrote the screen pUy. With an epic tale to tell, Hol lywood assembled an equally im pressive cast of the era's moat renowned screen actors: including John Wayne, Richard Burton, Charles Lawton, Sophia Lores, Rod Sleiger, Robert Mitchum. Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Robert Wag ner, Eddie Albert, Vic Morrow, Mel Ferrer, Edmond O'Brian, Robert Ryan, George Segal, Gert Frobe, Curt Jurgens, Paul Anka, Fabian, Sal Mineo, Roddy McDowell and Red Buttons. It's a typical "gung-ho" American war movie, with ?h- ???? fccrrsrs cf combat neatly sanitized. Still, it pro vides an entertaining introduction to the history and scope of the D-Day invasion 1 can't imagine TV networks let ting this anniversary pass without airing "The Longest Day." But if they do, local residents will have a rare opportunity to see the movie on screen. Saturday, June 4 , at 7 p.m.. the film will be shown as part of die Battleship USS North Carolina's an nual Memorial Day observance, pre ceded by a brief talk on the invasion by UNCW military historian Dr. Larry Cable. Admission is $2.
The Brunswick Beacon (Shallotte, N.C.)
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May 26, 1994, edition 1
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