Veteran's Day

I have some timeless quotes for this Veteran’s Day post. I’d like to begin with this story from my blog archives though.

I remember reading about two marines in the Pacific who won the Medal of Honor, one of them posthumously. The story was in a Time-Life Book series I bought about World War Two. It told the story of a Marine Special Weapons Platoon, in charge of guarding the Zanana beach supply area from being retaken by the Japanese on New Georgia. The Platoon put together a couple of 30 caliber machine guns from spare parts and established a rear guard post. Corporal Maier Rothschild and Private John Wantuck volunteered to man the guns. The platoon came under attack from a Japanese battalion, and retreated individually back to the beach, regrouping to face the next charge. It never came. In the morning, the Marines found Wantuck, and Rothschild had been cut off. They found these two Marines with more than a hundred dead Japanese littered around their spare-parts machine gun positions. Wantuck lay dead next to his empty gun, encircled by dead Japanese he had killed with his knife and grenades. Rothschild, wounded, lay surrounded by dead enemies. A Japanese General’s attack failed because of two bad ass American Marines.

Since the Marine Corps just celebrated their birthday, I used this one of many incredible true stories of America’s vets to remember this Veterans’ Day. Thank you all for your dedication, honor, and patriotism. Thank you all for our freedom.

And this Theodore Roosevelt quote:

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.”

British Philosopher, John Stewart Mills said this: ‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself’.”

God Bless the men and women defending our freedom!