I was watching the American Memorial Day celebration on PBS and they were telling the story of a true hero of the Second World War. It was the story about Charles Durning, he was not reading a story but he was telling us his story. It is an amazing tale of a wartime hero.
Here was a man who went through hell on Omaha Beach and was involved in a number of actions that are well know such as surviving the infamous Malmedy massacre, in which German officer Joachim Peiper had over 100 American prisoners shot dead without warning as they stood in a field. He notes in his biography that he still has nightmares about his wartime service.
He is a successful actor who is still active.
Here is a man to whom we owe our gratitude for his efforts in saving our freedoms during the second world war. He represents a whole generation that ensured that we would be free to be.
How many other people are like him, people who have giving of themselves to give us our freedoms and defend our way of life. We sometimes forget and only see the person who is in front of us. That person may be down on their luck or suffering from post traumatic stress disorder because they fought for our right to be who we are. We have to overlook some of the problems that our defenders face in current times because in a lot of cases they developed these problems while serving our country and us.
I look at my father and realize that a lot of his problems developed when he served with the 48th Highlanders of Canada during the Second World War. We owe them much more than we’ve given them. We must be ready to carry the torch of freedom and fight to keep it when it is threatened.
