[StBernard] Reagan Memorial Day Speech

[Westley Annis]

In honor of those who lost their lives while serving our country, we would
like to share with you President Ronald Reagan's 1986 Memorial Day remarks
at Arlington National Cemetery:

Today is the day we put aside to remember fallen heroes and to pray that no
heroes will ever have to die for us again. It's a day of thanks for the
valor of others, a day to remember the splendor of America and those of her
children who rest in this cemetery and others. It's a day to be with the
family and remember.

I was thinking this morning that across the country children and their
parents will be going to the town parade and the young ones will sit on the
sidewalks and wave their flags as the band goes by. Later, maybe, they'll
have a cookout or a day at the beach. And that's good, because today is a
day to be with the family and to remember.

Arlington, this place of so many memories, is a fitting place for some
remembering. So many wonderful men and women rest here, men and women who
led colorful, vivid, and passionate lives. There are the greats of the
military: Bull Halsey and the Admirals Leahy, father and son; Black Jack
Pershing; and the GI's general, Omar Bradley. Great men all, military men.
But there are others here known for other things.

Here in Arlington rests a sharecropper's son who became a hero to a lonely
people. Joe Louis came from nowhere, but he knew how to fight. And he
galvanized a nation in the days after Pearl Harbor when he put on the
uniform of his country and said, "I know we'll win because we're on God's
side." Audie Murphy is here, Audie Murphy of the wild, wild courage. For
what else would you call it when a man bounds to the top of a disabled tank,
stops an enemy advance, saves lives, and rallies his men, and all of it
single-handedly. When he radioed for artillery support and was asked how
close the enemy was to his position, he said, "Wait a minute and I'll let
you speak to them." [Laughter]

Michael Smith is here, and Dick Scobee, both of the space shuttle
Challenger. Their courage wasn't wild, but thoughtful, the mature and
measured courage of career professionals who took prudent risks for great
reward-in their case, to advance the sum total of knowledge in the world.
They're only the latest to rest here; they join other great explorers with
names like Grissom and Chaffee.

Oliver Wendell Holmes is here, the great jurist and fighter for the right. A
poet searching for an image of true majesty could not rest until he seized
on "Holmes dissenting in a sordid age." Young Holmes served in the Civil
War. He might have been thinking of the crosses and stars of Arlington when
he wrote: "At the grave of a hero we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable
loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate
joy we go back to the fight."

All of these men were different, but they shared this in common: They loved
America very much. There was nothing they wouldn't do for her. And they
loved with the sureness of the young. It's hard not to think of the young in
a place like this, for it's the young who do the fighting and dying when a
peace fails and a war begins. Not far from here is the statue of the three
servicemen-the three fighting boys of Vietnam. It, too, has majesty and
more. Perhaps you've seen it-three rough boys walking together, looking
ahead with a steady gaze. There's something wounded about them, a kind of
resigned toughness. But there's an unexpected tenderness, too. At first you
don't really notice, but then you see it. The three are touching each other,
as if they're supporting each other, helping each other on.

I know that many veterans of Vietnam will gather today, some of them perhaps
by the wall. And they're still helping each other on. They were quite a
group, the boys of Vietnam-boys who fought a terrible and vicious war
without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we
debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that
war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the
rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned
to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to
be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time.
They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild
courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age;
they stood for something.

And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That
just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we.
And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a
fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look
at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing
that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to
meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong.

That, of course, is the lesson of this century, a lesson learned in the
Sudetenland, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Cambodia. If we
really care about peace, we must stay strong. If we really care about peace,
we must, through our strength, demonstrate our unwillingness to accept an
ending of the peace. We must be strong enough to create peace where it does
not exist and strong enough to protect it where it does. That's the lesson
of this century and, I think, of this day. And that's all I wanted to say.
The rest of my contribution is to leave this great place to its peace, a
peace it has earned.

Thank all of you, and God bless you, and have a day full of memories.