Memorial Day: Choked Up with Gratitude

It happened again yesterday, as my wife and I traveled to Columbus to celebrate the high school graduation of our nephew, Jameson. As has been the custom for most of our married life, my wife was behind the wheel and I read to her. Our selections are usually histories or biographies.

Not always. When our kids were young, I read all seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia during a family trip to and from Walt Disney World. And one year, I read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

I remember that when reading the seventh of the Narnian books, The Last Battle, the most sublime writing I have ever read, I had to stop more than once. I was overcome with emotion by the beauty of Lewis' description of the "new Narnia," a fictional representation of the "new heaven and the new earth" all believers in Jesus Christ will one day experience.

And there were times when I read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever that I had to stop: first, from laughing so hard at the antics of the Herdmann kids and then, from getting misty over their understanding of what Christmas is really about.

Through the years, there have been books that have often caused me to choke up and stop to regain my composure. They're the onese that describe or allude to the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, when the largest amphibious force in history began the liberation of Europe from the tyranny of Nazism. It happened to me the first time when I read Stephen Ambrose's biography of Dwight Eisehnower and later, while reading Ambrose's book Citizen Soldier.

Every time I think of those young soldiers and paratroopers assaulting the beaches of Normandy, facing almost certain death--similar in some ways to the Union soldiers depicted in the Civil War epic, Glory--I get weepy. Gratitude wells up inside of me and I have to compose myself.

As I say, it happened again yesterday. During our recent road trips, I've been reading Andrea Mitchell's fine memoir, Talking Back. Yesterday, I came to Mitchell's narrative of Ronald Reagan's moving tribute to those who lost their lives on D-Day, June 6, 1944. It was, writes Mitchell, one of the few times in her journalistic career when she had allowed herself to take off the necessary lens of reportorial observer in order to feel the event she was covering. I wasn't expecting to be so moved by what she wrote:

The summer of 1984 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion and my first trip to cover the commemoration of D-Day. With American and Allied veterans gathered on a promontory over Omaha Beach, Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most poetic and powerful speeches of his presidency, written by his elegiac speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. As Reagan described the daunting feat of the Army Rangers who had climbed the cliffs in a hail of gunfire, he gazed at the aging veterans assembled in front of him and said, "These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc." The words were largely Peggy's, but in Reagan's unique way, he gave them life. In that one speech re-created the past, celebrated the present, and memorialized the achievements of the D-Day veterans for all future time.

It hit me again as I read that passage. I had to stop. "That gets me every time," I told my wife.

Whatever your feelings about the current war in Iraq or any of the wars our nation has fought since World War II, the necessity of which almost nobody I've known has ever questioned, every military person in our country's conflicts has done so from a sense of duty to us. This Memorial Day, be thankful for such people.

[You might also want to read this.]