A Tribute to the Fighting Man—1/25/2010
The week before last, I went over to my grandparents’ house to help my grandmother out with some simple chores that she is unable to do on her own due to her severe back problems. I also had to do some of the chores that my grandfather normally does. My grandfather has been in and out of the hospital all month because he is currently undergoing chemotherapy. I’m very worried about him, but I also realize that he is quite old and has worked hard his entire life; he deserves to be able to simply sit around doing whatever he wants to and shouldn’t have to lift a finger at his age since he has already done more than one lifetime’s work for his family…and for his country.
My grandfather Stewart Ryland Park is a fighting man. He served with the United States Navy in the Second World War aboard the USS Cockrill. He saw action in the North African, Atlantic, and Pacific Theaters of World War 2. He once saved a man’s life by grabbing a fellow sailor’s hand and preventing him from being washed overboard one night during a very bad storm. Having so many relatives in my family who were in every service of the United States Armed Forces except for the Coast Guard and saw combat in World War 1, World War 2, and the Korean War, I have great respect for Ryland. My grandmother divorced my dad’s father United States Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Frederick Carol Taylor and remarried to Ryland in 1984, and although he is not my biological relative, Ryland has still been a grandfather to me nonetheless; he and my grandmother have done a lot of nice things for me, such as taking me to their favorite hangout, the Town Point Club. Tom Brokaw could not have been more truthful and correct when he referred to the people of my grandfathers’ day as the “Greatest Generation”, and so I am more than happy to do a few menial tasks for Ryland. Though Ryland has compensated me monetarily for my time and effort doing his and my grandmother’s chores, I would still help him out for free even if he gave me nothing in return; his being a good grandfather by doing nice things for me and having been part of the Greatest Generation that went out and literally saved the world from the greatest tyranny in human history is compensation enough on its own, in my eyes. He served my country during a desperate time of war, and so I shall serve him in return.
Tragically, Ryland and the Greatest Generation are of a stark contrast to my contemporaries of the present day. The Idiot Generation’s festering beginnings were born out of the Hippy Generation and the internal political turmoil of the Vietnam War of the 1960s, political turmoil caused by America’s first truly incompetent and cowardly leaders whose ill-handling of the Vietnam War and not the mere U.S. intervention in the military conflict itself. Many of America’s leaders today have abandoned and forgotten about the Greatest Generation, and these miserable excuses for men helped create the Idiot Generation we have today, having been put in power in the first place by remnants of the Hippy Generation. The morons among the young people today are the descendants of the hippies who, in 1975, spat on American G.I.s coming home from the Vietnam War and called them such ridiculous insults as “baby-killers”; these hippies did nothing for their country except stir up more political strife which caused further incompetence among America’s leaders that in turn led to further poor handling of the war, as well as added to the stress and suffering of our heroic soldiers returning from Vietnam who had seen friends die and given all they had to defend the freedoms of the very same cowards who persecuted them for standing up to Communist aggression that was threatening an ignorant third world people with slave-like domination. All this needless persecution of our G.I.s did was to further add to the misunderstanding of war in general, as well as trigger and exacerbate Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among our servicemen. Such cruelty still continues today, except to much less of an extent. It seems as though the only men who die young or suffer most are good men who are only trying to do the right thing, while evil men and cowards go unpunished. If only we could spare our best and brightest of the rare exceptions in the Idiot Generation and send all of the morons and cowards off to war to suffer and die instead of sacrificing the lives of so many good men…
This all reminds me of the symbolic final conversation between fictional military men John Rambo and Colonel Trautman after Rambo has made it safely back to a friendly base in Thailand after successfully liberating several American POWs from Vietnam right at the end of the movie
Rambo: First Blood Part 2:
Colonel Trautman—“You’ll get a second Medal of Honor for this.”
John Rambo---[Looking over at the liberated American POWs.] “You should give it to them. They deserve it more.”
Colonel Trautman---“You don’t belong here. Why don’t you come back with me?”
John Rambo---“Back to what? All my friends died here. Let me die here.”
Colonel Trautman---“The war…the whole conflict may have been wrong, but damn it, don’t hate your country for it.”
John Rambo---“Hate? I’d die for it…”
Colonel Trautman---“Then what is it you want?”
John Rambo---“I want…what they want…and every other guy who came over here, spilled his guts, and gave everything he had…wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it! That’s what I want…”
Though that conversation came from a fictional movie with fictional characters, the type of agony Rambo expressed when he was talking to Trautman is the very same pain a lot of our military servicemen experience daily as they struggle with being hated at home by cowards who don’t deserve freedom and the scars they are forever left with after facing the horrors of the battlefield. They are heroes who should never be forgotten. War veterans should be honored and respected to the utmost of our ability every day. It might be true that our Founding Fathers gave us freedom, but that freedom would have ceased to exist long ago if it were not for our courageous military personnel. But the biggest war heroes of all...are all of the good fighting men who don’t come back…..
