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Jewish World Review May 30, 2011 / 26 Iyar, 5771 Remembering, We Forget By Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The daring raid that brought one They buried The date was Then, out of the wild blue yonder, American B-25s appeared above The president and commander-in-chief was always at his most chipper in the darkest hour. At the lowest ebb of American fortunes, A lieutenant colonel by the name of To reach their take-off point, they would have to evade the Japanese naval patrols that could have detected and sunk the aircraft carrier at any point on its route. Even if the American bombers managed to get past the Zeros swarming around their objective, uncertain weather might obscure their targets. And once they'd made it to their targets, they wouldn't carry enough fuel to make it back. The crews would have to head for Manchuria, ditch their aircraft, and bail out, hoping they'd fall into friendly hands.
Somehow it succeeded. One day the Japanese looked up and there the Americans improbably were -- for 30 seconds over Enraged, the Japanese would kill hundreds of thousands of Chinese in reprisal for the assistance given the American flyers. It was the first defeat, if only a symbolic one, that the invincible empire had suffered in the long war it had begun. Many more would follow before the war would conclude in formal ceremonies aboard the USS Missouri in Colonel Bower, having bailed out of his bomber, landed on a mountaintop that long, cold night and waited for the dawn. He wrapped his silk parachute around him till Chinese troops found him. He would live to join the rest of his crew, make it home, and live to a ripe, fully earned old age. He would attend many a reunion of the Doolittle Raiders. When they played Taps at his burial this month, it sounded almost triumphant. Like a homecoming. He had joined good company. ____ Let no one think on this Today we remember not just heroes but the cannoneers who didn't have time to learn their guns before they died in the mud, the troops whom disease took before the enemy could, the nurses blown apart while administering to the wounded and dying, the young conscripts -- ill-trained, ill-clothed and ill-prepared -- sacrificed in America's forgotten war in Korea. No, let no one think on this You who read this in freedom, and I who write it in the safety and comfort of a clean, well-lighted office, can do so only because, in a thousand places at a thousand times, grimy, terrified, unsure young soldiers in the fullness of life were willing to give theirs. That is the price of our forgetful freedom. There is nothing we can do for the dead now, but there is much we can do for the living. We can ask where our wounded and convalescent are, and how they are faring. We can see that they, and their families, are cared for. And when they are stacked in hospitals like so much cordwood, put out of our sight like something indecent, we can demand to know what is being done for those who have given so much. For we do not live in some abstract realm -- like the past or in politicians' speeches or in
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