How do we adequately commemorate our war dead? The soldiers and sailors and airmen and women who gave their lives in places like Normandy, and Anzio, and Palermo, and Inchon, and Khe Sanh, and Ia Drang, and Fallujah, and Sangin? How do we pay homage to our fellow citizens who were ordered to a foreign land to fight for their country and lost their lives doing it?
We have Memorial Day ceremonies every year at veterans cemeteries at home and abroad. We have monuments, like the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the memorials to the dead of World War II and Korea. And we have anniversaries like the one that just happened in Normandy, France, to commemorate the landing on D-Day, June 6, 1944, now 75 years ago.
We’ve had them before. Thirty-five years ago, on June 6, 1984, the 40th anniversary of D-Day, President Ronald Reagan went to Normandy and gave a speech commemorating the dead which many think a classic. Twenty years before that, Dwight David Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces on D-Day in 1944 and gave the order for the invasion, went to Normandy and gave an interview to Walter Cronkite of CBS News on the anniversary of the landings.
View the complete June 8 article by Lucian K. Truscott from Salon on the AlterNet website here.