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Once We Knew Who to Honor
“Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day,” writes Peter Collier over at Opinion Journal, “those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration.”
Collier recently wrote the biographical sketches for a book featuring formal photographs of all our living Medal of Honor recipients. In talking with these living heroes, Collier writes: “I was, of course, chilled by the primal power of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had become strangers–honored strangers, but strangers nonetheless–in our midst.”
As a country, we used to know the stories of our heroes: Audie Murphy, Jimmy Doolittle, Alvin York. “And it was assumed,” Collier continues, “that what they had done defined us as well as them, telling us what kind of nation we were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually unknown except for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become the military equivalent of genre painting. There’s something wrong with that.
What they did in battle was extraordinary. Jose Lopez, a diminutive Mexican-American from the barrio of San Antonio, was in the Ardennes forest when the Germans began the counteroffensive that became the Battle of the Bulge. As 10 enemy soldiers approached his position, he grabbed a machine gun and opened fire, killing them all. He killed two dozen more who rushed him. Knocked down by the concussion of German shells, he picked himself up, packed his weapon on his back and ran toward a group of Americans about to be surrounded. He began firing and didn’t stop until all his ammunition and all that he could scrounge from other guns was gone. By then he had killed over 100 of the enemy and bought his comrades time to establish a defensive line.
We have forgotten Jose Lopez.
The way the press is covering Iraq, we will not have the opportunity to forget the heroes of today. We cannot forget a person we have never known.
One of the great outrages of our day is the failure of the world’s free press to report the hero stories of today.
This failure does violence not only to the memories of the greatest of our generation, it diminishes us as a country and a culture. Collier concludes:
We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys’ adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we’ve heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we’re uncertain about what we celebrate. We’re the land of the free for one reason only: We’re also the home of the brave.