by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/p>\n
A<\/span>\u00a0civilization is won or lost by those who fight to protect it \u2014 and judged as deserving by the gratitude offered to its soldiers by those who were saved. Afghanistan and Iraq remind us that there are now Americans in battle in the tradition of 1776, 1864, 1918, or 1944. But are we, the public, still cognizant of their sacrifice as our forefathers once were?<\/p>\n This Veterans Day we should worry that we have not passed to the next generation proper commemoration \u2014 or even knowledge \u2014 of Saratoga, Shiloh, St. Mihiel, Metz, Chosun, or Hue. In part, the culprit is our own madcap lives. We are so wired with blackberries or glued to play stations, that we don\u2019t inquire much about the fields of white crosses \u2014 and their anonymous dead \u2014 that each year, for a blink, appear on our Veterans Day television screens.<\/p>\n When in Europe we don\u2019t pay our respects at the American cemetery at Hamm. Indeed, we know an American battle only to the degree it has been the rare topic of a recent film. Thanks to\u00a0Saving Private Ryan<\/i>\u00a0there is still a D-Day among our youth.<\/p>\n Politically correct history has also made us indifferent to the sacrifice of the soldier. The Civil War, we are sometimes told, was not really over slavery anyway. The Great War was unnecessary infighting among European aristocracies. World War II is now as much the Japanese Internment, Rosy the Riveter, and Hiroshima, as saving Europe and Asia from a racist slavery at places like Falaise and Tarawa. Does anyone make the connection between a Samsung television or Kia in our showrooms with the bloody see-saw struggles for Seoul? Why is a Noriega in jail, why are Milosevic and Saddam bad memories, and why are men walking without beards in Kabul?<\/p>\n What American from Tulare or Lansing died for all that \u2014 and the larger notion that dictators were to be fought and defeated far away, rather than here at home? Do we still appreciate that our soldiers, so many of whom have perished to keep us free \u2014 and yet also freed a defeated enemy as well from a Hitler, or Tojo, or the Taliban \u2014 knowing that had they failed our enemies, would not be so magnanimous?<\/p>\n In our sophistication, perhaps too we think we should have evolved beyond war, the nature of man at last changed for good through greater education, affluence, and experience. Commemorating war\u2019s toll, then, for some, may be like recalling cancer \u2014 as if the oncologist and soldier alike somehow are tainted by the respective horror of what they must do.<\/p>\n Or is the problem that our military has become so adept \u2014 or so small a percentage of the population \u2014 that we are only vaguely cognizant of far-off places like Basra, Bosnia, Grenada, Kandahar, Kosovo, Lebanon, Mogadishu, or Panama \u2014 battlefields where someone else in the military did something for some apparently necessary reason? Most Americans have little clue whether any of our own died the last twenty years in Panama or were lost in Mogadishu. Or if so, how and why?<\/p>\n We should remember on this Veterans Day that some very young people \u2014 with long futures, in the prime of health, and at the center of their families \u2014 died for the rest of us. They lost their lives not just for us to watch an OJ outburst in Vegas or\u00a0American Idol<\/i>, but for the idea that we \u2014 most often not so young, not so hale, and not with such bright futures as our soldiers \u2014 could be free at their expense; free, not merely from being conquered or enslaved, but free from the very thought of it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online A\u00a0civilization is won or lost by those who fight to protect it \u2014 and judged as deserving by the gratitude offered to its soldiers by those who were saved. Afghanistan and Iraq remind us that there are now Americans in battle in the tradition of 1776, 1864, 1918, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[752],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Ui","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2512,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-i-read-the-new-york-times\/","url_meta":{"origin":3490,"position":0},"title":"Why I Read the New York Times","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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