Honoring Those Who Gave Their Lives

American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach, Normandy

THINK NOT ONLY ON THEIR PASSING

REMEMBER THE GLORY OF THEIR SPIRIT

---inscription at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach


This page was first posted several years ago for Memorial Day.

It is important to remember those who gave their lives for our freedom every day.

Please take a moment to read the following passages.

All of these books are available through local and on-line book sellers.


That is our war, and we will carry it with us as we go on from one battleground to another until it is all over, leaving some of us behind on every beach, in every field. We are just beginning with the ones who lie back of us here in Tunisia. I don't know whether it was their good fortune or their misfortune to get out of it so early in the game. I guess it doesn't make any difference, once a man has gone. Medals and speeches and victories are nothing to them any more. They died and others lived and nobody knows why it is so. They died and thereby the rest of us can go on and on. When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones beneath the wooden crosses, except perhaps to pause and murmur, "Thanks, pal."

Ernie Pyle, from "Here Is Your War"


When you lose a friend you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him-ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed."

Bill Mauldin, from "Up Front"


Here are links to some of the National Cemeteries and Memorials that I have visited. Any National Cemetery is an excellent place to contemplate the price that has been paid for our freedom.

Arlington National Cemetery

Golden Gate National Cemetery

National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific

Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial


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