Hi to all, and Happy Memorial Day,
I purposely took this story out of order from the Table of Contents in my father’s book, “It’s a Wonderful World” so I could publish it on Memorial Day weekend. As I was reading near the end of this document, I couldn’t help but wonder what dad would have to say about the current Russian intervention into our political system and election process, casting a pall over our election system and our current president and his administration. Don’t get excited! . . . I’m not making any assumptions or judgments. Donald Trump is our President. Just stating what is being reported in the “legitimate news”.
I’m certain dad would be appalled at the audacity and subterfuge of Vladimir Putin, and how “fake news” is presented into the media and mixed with “real news”, blurring the lines of reality, taking advantage of angry and displaced persons and causing divisions between friends and relatives.
This story is about Memorial Day and remembering all who sacrificed their lives and the families who support those who put themselves into harms way so that we may have the freedoms and lifestyles we choose, here in the United States of America. My daughter, Jennifer and her husband Jacob are career soldiers in the United States Army and have sworn to defend our country. That includes following the orders of our Commander in Chief (I get that, Jenn) This story is for them and for all our heroes, living and dead.
We salute you and thank you for your sacrifice on this day and every day that you continue to defend our way of life,
David Tschirhart
Memorial Day Remembered
By Don Tschirhart
From his unpublished book “It’s a Wonderful World”
After reading for many years about the great battle of Gettysburg, I visited the Pennsylvania battlefield up close.
This battlefield and the one at Yorktown are probably the best at interpreting historic battles.
First stop had to be downtown Gettysburg and the National Historic Building where the battlefield is laid out in a relief map showing hills and soldier placements on a large table. Narration takes visitors through each phase.
In our car we drove around the battlefield using a taped description to explain the three-day battle from point to point.
From Confederate positions on Seminary Hill I looked over the vacant field to the Union position on Cemetery Hill and the mile of tall grass that separated the positions.
“My gosh that’s a long ways,” I told Margie. “These guys had to charge that far? How scared all of them must have been. Yet they charged into battle bravely.”
We drove to Little Round Top and I climbed around the nearby Devil’s Den, a good size cairn of rocks. I could imagined the anguish and fear of the blue and grey-clad soldiers before they were mutilated by bullets and cannon shot and lay still between the rocks.
Emotions hit me when I looked at The Bloody Angle. Tears came to my eyes as I thought of the stupidity of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and the terrible tragedy of Pickett’s Charge that felled seven thousand men to cannon and rifle fire in just a few minutes.
This particular spot — called by later historians the High Water Mark of the Confederacy — ended the battle that had 51,000 Union and Confederate casualties.
I stepped over the Bloody Angle wall and walked alone a few hundred yards out into the grassy field in front of the strong Union position, stopped, turned and looked back at the angled prize those intrepid rebel soldiers tried to reach.
As I walked slowly back, my mind’s ear heard bullets singing by my head, rebel cries and the screams of pain from the wounded and dying.
I thought: “This is what it took to save the nation from division. The sacrificial deaths of these screaming rebels and blue bellies added to our country’s greatness.”
As I look back at the history of the United States I see how it took special men and women who desperately wanted to live, yet when it came to push and shove they gave their lives to gain the freedom we now enjoy.
We’ve had to fight for our independent existence from the shot heard ‘round the world” at Lexington in 1776 and again in 1815. We survived a major depression in the late 1920s and 1930s, a Civil conflict that took hundreds of thousands of lives, two world wars that saved much of the world from dictatorship, two conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, the assassination of four presidents, two wars in the Middle East which finally toppled an Iraqi “maniac.” And we are still in an insidious conflict with cowardly terrorists.
As important as these action events were, most important was the American victory in the Cold War, which took an untold number of lives and cost trillions of dollars that could have been spent on the world’s poor.
Americans have pride. Even now our hearts pound a little faster when we read or hear George Washington’s Farewell Address, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech.
But I believe the most important and effective words were spoken by President Ronald Reagan.
I listened in awe as Reagan stood on a platform near the Berlin Wall and shouted his demand:
“MR. GORBECHEV! TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!”
It was a clarion call that did more than tear down the Berlin Wall. It tore down the 70-plus years of a major communist dictatorship that threatened to take over the world.
Of all the news stories during the 20th century — harnessing the atom, new computer age, transportation and wars — I believe the most important event was the downfall of the Russian empire.
On Monday we will celebrate “just” another Memorial Day, a day when all of us bow our heads in prayer as we remember American women and men — Irish, Polish, African-American, German, Italian, Hispanic, American Indian, Japanese, Chinese, French, English, so many other nationalities, and a blend of all the above — who died to make our country what it is today — the very best and freest in the world.
As citizens of this great nation we should pray on this Memorial Day that as Abraham Lincoln said, “Their sacrifice will not be in vain,” and that all those in the armed forces who gave their lives should rest in wondrous heavenly bliss.
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