June 6, 1944...

So many years now, and so many with the memories of that day now gone. We look back on D-Day and the other horrific set-piece battles of World War 2 with an air of unreality, through goggles of the omnipresent media...perhaps the epic celluloid battles against the Sith or the dinosaurs of Jurrasic Park are more "real" to us than our fathers', or our grandfathers, great sacrifices. As Americans, I believe we cannot look back at D-Day, at the Second World War, without a sense of utmost reverence, a profound sense of the power of good to triumph over evil even in the face of unimaginable pain, suffering and death.

As those Allied soldiers and Marines fought their way east, they found the remains of an equally unimaginable evil, the living vestiges of human beings' capacity for creating a hell on earth. As we pause to honor the greatest generation we do so with a sense of rising unease, that as we watch the events unfolding on the world's stage we do so with a nagging sense we've seen it, or at least heard about it, all before...

...the rising tide of anti-Semitism...the call for worldwide jihad...the acquiescence of the major powers... and once again the assurance of peace in our time...

Sometimes in my most depressing dreams I hear the rattling sounds of boxcars headed east, and I pray that the courage, the resolve, the faith, the essential goodness of those men who rode the landing crafts to beaches whose names we could once recite from the heart still flows in America's veins.

To all who serve, our undying thanks. God bless America.