[June 06, 2015] During one of my combat tours, my senior headquarters gave our troops the souvenir opportunity to have a U.S. flag flown over the Saddam’s main palace in Baghdad. We had to buy the flag and turn it in with a written request that included name and date to be on a certificate. My good friend Bill, a WWII history buff, was to be the recipient so I requested his name and June 6, 2007 to correspond with D-Day, June 6, 1944.
When I arrived to pick up my flag and certificate, there had been an error and it was flown on June 5th instead of on my request. When I inquired about it to the U.S. Army Staff Sergeant in charge, he told me that there was nothing special about any date so he simply used dates convenient to him. I asked if he understood the significance of D-Day 1944. He apologized and said he didn’t know much about it except it was a big day during the war.
To make a long story short, we had a long talk about D-Day, the strategy, its significance, the allied preparation, the landings, and the follow-on of forces streaming into northwestern Europe; an invasion that eventually drove the Nazi military out of all occupied territory. What surprised me most was his near complete lack of knowledge of D-Day but more so his attitude that it was ancient history and it didn’t matter.
“People who live their lives in the past have one blind eye, those who ignore the past are blind in both eyes.” – Unknown
This was the case here. He didn’t know, for example, that it was an Allied operation, not just U.S., and that it involved more than landing troops but was coordinated closely with naval and air forces that paved the way for those troops. Furthermore, he had misunderstood both the cost in human lives and equipment and also to the effect on the overall war effort.
Let’s not be blind to history. And while we should not live in the past, we should never forget it. History teaches everyone, including leaders, great lessons in human behavior, what evil is and what good is, and that we can be a better person by the study of history.
Today, we pay our respect to those involved in D-Day and all those who helped destroy the Axis machine that inflicted great harm and misery on many civilizations across the world.
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