A special shout out to my fellow veterans today.
November 11 marks the day when an Armistice was signed between the Allies and the Central Powers of Europe during World War I. That war; fought using 19th Century Napoleonic tactics of massed troop formations facing off massed troop formations but using modern weaponry like heavy machine guns, tanks, aircraft and even poison gas; was one of the worst slaughters in the annals of human warfare. That war was not ended by the Armistice. The "War to End All Wars" never really ended and is being fought to this day. The Armistice simply hit the "pause" button.
That pause was used by Lenin and his Communists to win the Bolshevik Revolution with the fall of St. Petersburg. And in Germany, the humiliating and harsh conditions of surrender imposed by the Allies resulted in a frustrated sense of nationalism wronged. Into the vacuum of the German national soul stepped one Adolf Hitler. On September 1 1939 Hitler sparked what we call "World War II" (but what we think is more properly called "The World War, Part II") with his invasion of Poland. He had made alliances with the Japanese, too; and when Japan attacked the United States on December 7th 1941, WW II became a truly global conflagration, the first in history.
Less than three years after Pearl Harbor, Allied troops landed at Normandy. A few weeks shy of a year later, Berlin and most of Germany lay in smoking ruins. By the end of the summer of 1945, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lay in ruins too, the results of two single bombs of a new and terrible design. Part II of the World War ended with the utter defeat of the two most monstrous tyrannies the world had ever known. It was scarcely over before Part III (The Cold War) began.
Russia was eager to grab as much real estate as possible and turn those living there into vassals. Germany was split into two parts, one free and one Communist (and the Soviets, being not "antinazi" but rather the political kinsmen of National Socialists kept elements of the Gestapo, Kripo, Ordpo, and SS but re-trained them and renamed them the Vopo and the Stassi). The Allies - particularly America - grabbed the cream of German weapons scientists and drew the line of Soviet expansion at the Fulda Gap of the Alps.
The Cold War got white-hot in "proxy wars" fought in Laos, Cambodia and most importantly Korea and Vietnam. Vietnam was lost not due to the United States forces being beaten but by politicians in the United States demanding our withdrawal and declining to support the forces of Freedom. Korea was fought to a standstill and the fighting was stopped by a shaky but thus far still standing Armistice (like the one that was signed at the beginning of all this tumult.)
Sometime toward the fall of Communism the Soviets decided to invade Afghanistan. It was the worst mistake they ever made. The Afghans fought like the irregular troops of the Continental Army during our Revolution, using ambush tactics and U.S. supplied weapons to waylay and harass the Soviets. Their humiliated pullout emboldened the Polish people to rally behind their fellow citizens Pope John Paul the Great and Lech Walensa. This solidarity caught fire, and by the late 1980s we who were told in our youth that we would never see the "Berlin Wall" fall in our lifetimes watched on television as mobs of young Germans - no longer "East" or "West" Germans - took sledgehammers to that damned barrier. The Hammer and Sickle was ripped down and replaced by the Russian Tricolor.
Still it wasn't over. The World War part IV was about to begin.
The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan gave rise to two main groups: The Northern Alliance, who cared less about establishing a theocracy; and the Pakistani Taliban, who wanted to establish a Salafist Islamic theocracy globally. After years of fighting, the leader of the Northern Alliance was slain in what would turn out to be the beginning of the World War part IV. The next day, the United States of America were attacked in the first act of Part IV. The World War Part IV continues to this day. Every day new veterans are minted. These veterans can proudly trace their heritage to Concord Bridge, up through D-Day and VE and VJ day through the Siege of Baghdad and the demise of Osama bin Laden. We all of us have been fighting a never ending battle against the forces of evil and tyranny since before the founding of these United States. And for all this fighting and killing and dying still it must be said of every military man of this blessed nation that the bringing about of peace and freedom is what he or she is working and hoping for.
PEACE IS AND WAS OUR PROFESSION. But we will not have "peace at any price". The peace of surrender to tyrants and despots is a peace paid for by subjugation to Satan himself. Let him who would enslave the globe know that American bayonets await his throat. My fellow veterans, you are magnificent.
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