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BARRANCAS MEMORIAL CEREMONY REMARKS
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| May 30th, 2004 |
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BARRANCAS MEMORIAL CEREMONY REMARKS OF CONGRESSMAN JEFF MILLER OF FLORIDA
MAY 30, 2004
Thank you, Terry, for your kind introduction, and thank you all for the warm welcome. I am honored to be here today with all of you at Barrancas National Cemetery, where in just a few moments, we will take part in a solemn wreath laying tradition. This very same tradition is being performed today at American cemeteries across this nation and around this world.
This is a day our country has set apart to remember what was gained in our wars, and all that was lost. Our wars have won for us every hour we live in freedom. Our wars have taken from us the men and women we honor today, and every hour of the lifetimes they had hoped to live.
The heroes we remember never really set out to be heroes. Each loved his life as much as we love ours. Each had a place in the world, a family waiting and friends to see again. They thought of the future just as we do, with plans and hopes for a long life. But they left it all behind when they went to war, and parted with it forever when they died.
Every Memorial Day we gather at places like this to grasp the extent of their loss and the meaning of the sacrifice. Its more than words can cover. In the end, all we can do is be thankful; all we can do is remember, and always appreciate the price that was paid for our own lives and our own freedom.
Today, in thousands of towns, Americans have gathered to pay their own tributes to the men and women who died young – some very young. We often think of this as one of great national loss, and that is certainly the case. But for so many, and perhaps many of us here today, there is one name among all the others, a name that recalls a different time and memories held close and quiet. To those who have known such loss and felt such absence in their life, Memorial Day gives formal expression to a very personal experience. Your losses can be marked, but not measured. And we can never measure the value of what was gained in their sacrifice. We live it every day in the comforts of peace and the gifts of freedom. These have all been purchased for us, and we're grateful for the sacrifice.
As we observe this day of remembrance and honor, we remember the more than one million Americans who have died to preserve our freedom, the more than 140,000 citizens who were prisoners of war, and all those who were declared missing in action.
This year in particular, we honor many heroes by observing the 60th anniversary of D-Day on the beaches of Normandy, and by dedicating the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.
More than nine thousand of our own are buried at Normandy, and many times that number of fallen soldiers lay in our cemeteries across Europe and America. From a distance, surveying row after row of markers, one can see the scale and heroism and sacrifice of the young. The image brings about thoughts of units sustaining massive casualties, men cut down crossing a beach, or taking a hill, or securing a bridge. We think of many hundreds of sailors, lost in their ships.
War correspondent Ernie Pyle told of a British officer walking across the battlefield just after the violence had ended. Seeing the bodies of American boys scattered everywhere, the officer said, in a hushed eulogy spoken only to himself, "Brave men, brave men."
All who visit Normandy feel the enormity of the loss. Yet, for so many, there is a marker that seems to sit alone -- they went looking for that one cross, that one Star of David, that one name. Behind every grave of a fallen soldier is a story of the grief that came to a wife, a mother, a child, a family, or a town.
Thirty-eight pairs of brothers died in the liberation, including Bedford and Raymond Hoback of Virginia, both who fell on D-Day. Raymond's body was never found. All he left behind was his Bible, discovered in the sand. Their mother asked that Bedford be buried at Normandy as well, in the place Raymond was lost, so her sons would always be together.
The grave markers of Normandy all face west, across an ageless and indifferent ocean, to the country these men and women served and loved. The thoughts of America on this Memorial Day turn to them and to all their fallen comrades in arms. We think of them with lasting gratitude, and we pray for them. And we trust in the words of God, which are inscribed in the chapel on that French shore: "I give unto them eternal life, that they shall never perish."
In the sixtieth year after Pearl Harbor, President George W. Bush signed into law legislation that will ensure that this nation will always remember the World War II generation, their heroism and humility, and their terrible suffering.
And in this, the sixtieth year after Normandy, that is preserved on the Washington Mall. The National World War II Memorial will serve as a monument to the more than 400,000 who died, and the millions who supported the war effort from home.
The size and central location of the memorial – seven and one-half acres, midway between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial – imply the monumental nature of the war it commemorates: the largest, most catastrophic event in human history, at least since the Great Flood.
From the German invasion of Poland in 1939 until the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945, the war lasted 2,193 days and claimed an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every three seconds. In the time it has taken me to speak these words aloud, ten people perished in World War II -- an estimated total of 60 million.
The new memorial is 21st century America's effort to capture, in granite and bronze and gilt lettering, the 20th century's myth, "a vast imagining of a primal time" -- in the words of novelist John Updike -- "when good and evil contended for the planet, a tale of Troy whose angles are infinite and whose central figures never fail to amaze us with their size, their theatricality, their sweep."
The day is fast approaching when not a single human alive has a personal recollection of the war, which then will become mythology, history and collective memory. Although 16.4 million Americans served during the war, fewer than 5 million remain alive; the youngest survivors now are in their late seventies, and they are dying at the rate of 1,100 a day.
The memorial is a tribute not only to those who served, or the 291,000 U.S. battle deaths, or the 670,000 U.S. wounded, or the tens of millions who labored in factories and fields and dockyards. It is an effort to convey, to generations hence, that the war was a struggle both about territory. As historian Gerhard L. Weinberg has written, it’s "about who would live and control the resources of the globe, and which peoples would vanish entirely because they were believed inferior or undesirable by the victors."
World War II ranged across six continents, from the battlefields we’ve heard of – Stalingrad, Coral Sea, Anzio, and Normandy – to places rarely associated with the battling, like the Aleutians, Madagascar, Syria and Darwin, and Australia.
It was a time when heroes came forth, but it was not an age of heroes. For many American veterans, the notion that they embody “The Greatest Generation” seems downright silly. In part that reflects rival claims from both the Founding Fathers and the Civil War generation, but it also reflects a realization that the war was too immense to be confined to a single generation: The senior military and civilian leaders mostly were born in the 1880s and 1890s -- Roosevelt in 1882, and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1890 -- while the trigger-pullers mostly were born in the 1910s and 1920s.
World War II shaped a world. Its technological legacies include radar, jet airplanes, ballistic missiles, computers -- first developed to enhance code-breaking -- nuclear weapons, various medical miracles and industrialized genocide. No less profound, it strangled the ambitions of Germany, Japan and Italy; signaled an end to the British and French empires; politically fractured the entire European continent and individual countries, such as Korea, Vietnam and Germany; it led to the creation of both the United Nations and NATO; and yielded a bipolar world of Soviet and U.S. superpowers that persisted for a half-century.
I know that, oftentimes, veterans are not eager to look back at their experiences. Hardest of all is to recall the ones who never live to be called veterans. But memory is our duty, and on this day, it is our privilege. So at this time, I would like all those who served our nation in World War II, World War II widows and World War II orphans to raise their hands, so we can thank you for your service.
Today, all who wear the uniform of the United States are serving at a crucial hour in history, and each has answered a great call to serve our Nation on the front lines of freedom. As we continue to fight terrorism and promote peace and freedom, let us pray for the safety and strength of our troops, for God's blessing on them and their families, and for those who have lost loved ones.
Words can only go so far in capturing the grief and sense of loss for the families of those who died in all our wars. For some military families in America and in Europe, the grief is recent, with the losses we have suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq. They can know, however, that the cause is just and, like other generations, these sacrifices have spared many others from tyranny and sorrow.
Long after putting away his uniform, a World War II American GI expressed his own pride in the truth about all who served, living and dead. He said, "I feel like I played my part in turning this from a century of darkness into a century of light."
Today, and on every forthcoming Memorial Day, we pause to honor those who fell from the line, who left us never knowing how much they would be missed. We pray for them, with an affection that grows deeper with the years. And we remember them, all of them, with the love of a grateful nation.
Thank you.
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There are no Floor Speechess to be displayed for this month.
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