Sermon: What We Owe Our Soldiers, What We Owe Our Kids

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What We Owe Our Soldiers, What We Owe Our Kids
Memorial Day, 2009

By Charles Rush

May 24, 2009

Developing a proper awe towards God is a lesson in wisdom,
And with humility do we begin to understand the importance of honor.

[ Audio (mp3, 6.1Mb) ]

live much of my life around in close enough proximity to wealth and celebrity that my attention is routinely diverted in their direction. I suppose most of us feel like we should be the beautiful people. But I'm pretty sure that none of that is of any importance. I'm pretty sure that the only thing that really matters is honor and integrity.

I don't think I've ever heard of a sermon opening with a commercial but I open with a commercial today. And I'm quite sure, I've never heard a sermon that opens with a Beer commercial. But I would commend the people at Anheuser-Busch for a commercial I have probably watched hundreds of times and you've seen it too. It depicts the world as it should be. [Press the yellow triangle to play the video. Make sure your sound is turned on. The button makes it full screen.]

Budweiser - Anheuser Busch: Thanking the Troops | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

In the world as it should be, the men and women of honor, would be recognized with the gratitude of their peers routinely. I wish the world were so simple that we could identify them that readily. Alas it is not.

But it is appropriate, indeed obligatory, that we Americans stop one day out of the year and remember the sacrifices that we have asked them to make on our behalf.

I was in Jerusalem last year with a group of over-earnest liberal clergymen from the United States. We were in a meeting with a Palestinian negotiator who lives in Gaza. He was becoming very animated and angry as he listed off all of the mistakes of American foreign policy and the wounds they had left on the Arab peoples. At one point, he mentioned President Bush by name. This Presbyterian Minister interjected a comment, “Don't blame me, I didn't vote for him.”

This caused the Palestinian negotiator to stop mid-sentence, finger still in the air. There was a long pause. He turned to the Presbyterian clergyman and say, “My friend, you are blessed to live in a Democratic Republic. I am not. You have the great gift of freedom and self-determination. And one of the responsibilities of this freedom is that you elect your leaders. Let me assure you that President Bush is your President.”

Americans, of all people, shouldn't be too thin skinned about criticism. Generations have fought and died for the privilege of critique. All those apoplectic faces around the world, creased with lines of disappointment at the American exercise of power… They are often the first inarticulate longing of a people recently awakened to the terrific promise of freedom. For better and worse, the rest of the world look to us because the ideals of our Country's founding contain the most noble expression of our common life yet penned. No other country would have ever been given a statute of Liberty with the words:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

No, we put these people in harm's way to protect us and to protect these freedoms for the future when some future generation might actually live up to their great promise.

We do ask a lot of them. And the human toll is tremendous. I've worked with Bridges for 15 years, introduced probably hundreds of suburban kids to our friends who live on the streets of Manhattan. Invariably, kids want to know how people become homeless. Drugs and alcohol- yes, it is a contributing factor. Mental illness- yes. Minimal family support- yes, it is a contributing factor. And… an alarming number of them are Vietnam Veterans.

This year I asked the boys in my Confirmation Class to meet with one of the men two generations removed from them. I asked the former principal at Brayton school, Mr. Nelson, if he would meet with them to talk to them about being in World War 2.

Just before he got there, I showed them a short piece of tape from the beginning of the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan'. It is from the first wave at Omaha beach on Normandy on D-Day. Probably the most realistic piece of tape to take you inside the battle, it fills normal men with a palpable fear. Who knows what goes through the mind of adolescent boys. They get it at some level, but still when a hand grenade blows the leg off of a soldier, a couple of them went ‘oooh gross'. That is because the only thing they ever see die is featured in a video game where nothing is really real.

Tape over. Lights come up. We all gather around a table. Typical meeting of men… We pull out a map. This is France. This is England. This is the English channel. We were stationed here near Dover on an LST. Here is a picture of the boat.

“Were you in that first wave?” one of the boys asks.

“No” says Mr. Nelson “we were supposed to be but…”

“Why not?” says another boy.

“Well, the night before the invasion, we were running a lot of maneuvers, some real and some to throw the Germans off course, and our boat was out on a patrol. We had engine problems and had to be rescued, so almost our entire crew, unloaded from our boat and got on another boat. A few of us stayed with the original boat while it got towed back to be fixed in harbor.

‘What happened to the guys that left?'

‘They were on patrols that night in the English Channel when they were sighted by a German U-Boat. The German boat fired a torpedo and all 275 of them were killed… At the time, we had a complete black out of communications because our success at D-Day demanded the element of surprise. So, we weren't allowed to report that their boat went down. The Army didn't contact their families. We had to pretend like it didn't happen.'

‘Well what happened to you?'

‘I went into Normandy on the second wave.'

‘What was your job?'

‘I hauled the wounded off the beach and we took them back to the hospitals in England.'

So, let me get this straight. Almost all the guys you trained with from the beginning of being drafted until the night before your deployment, all those guys that at the moment were your best buddies in life, were killed the night before your first battle.

You couldn't reach out to any of their families or even talk about it really. And there wasn't time anyway because the battle is on, so you spent the next few days ferrying horribly wounded comrades back and forth across that incredibly rough channel.

I'm watching this octogenarian reporting this to a bunch of youngsters. I want to say to them, ‘you know he was only 5 years older than you guys' but I don't because I know that they won't get it. For the most part, I'm glad that they really can't. We've given them a full and rounded childhood. I think that is what their grandfathers would have wanted for the most part. They lived through an unbelievable trauma.

I know for Mr. Nelson that the reward for doing a good job on Normandy was to be shipped to the South Pacific where he got to do it all over again a few more times. You think about these things for the rest of your life, more often the older you get. We put these guys through a lot and ‘thank you' seems like not nearly enough. They bring to mind that phrase from the Marine War Memorial ‘Where uncommon valor was a common occurrence.”

My boys only knew him as a nice elderly guy that sits in the back of the church.

I think of another nice elderly guy that is now deceased, Pete Moran. Most everyone remembers Pete as the guy in the eccentric plaid pants. He had a green pair, a red pair- pants I hope they only sell in Ireland.

Pete was 18 going on 19 when he was drafted, went to flight school and trained as a pilot. He was sent to the South of France where the Americans were sending bombers over occupied France into Germany.

I believe it was his very first, or possibly his second mission, flying a B-46. He was a co-pilot. The Germans were targeting the planes on their return flights and this mission was no exception. They were heavily straffed and took a tremendous amount of damage.

The gunner was killed, the navigator was killed, the pilot was killed. The wing was hit bad and they believed that the fuel tank might have been leaking. The plane was tilting hard to the right without one of the wings and Pete said that it took all of his strength to hold the steering mechanism to keep the plane as level as they could. They were going down and going down fast.

They were behind enemy lines, so Pete tried to keep the plane aloft as long as he possibly could to get as close to a rescue point as possible. Finally, he put the plane down in a farm field in France. All the way down, the boys were expecting the plane to blow up in a ball of flames when the leaking gas tank exploded. You can imagine their frame of mind in that minute.

They hit, bounce, hit, come to a stop. Nothing. Pete is strapped into the cockpit. He was never sure whether it was the physical strain on holding that stick for so long or the mental strain of that mission, but he starts to lose consciousness and can't get his seat belt off.

2/3's of the crew are dead or wounded. The guys that are alive are expecting the plane to blow up at any minute. They can't get in the cockpit through the door. But instead of running to save their lives, they jump on top of the plane, smash an opening, lean in, undo the seat belt. Pete is completely out and they pull him up out of the cockpit, haul him on their back, grab the other wounded guys and beat a path into the woods before the Germans can spot them.

What makes boys become men and girls become women in moments like that? How is it that people can find the resolve to focus on the needs of others when they face such peril themselves. There is a powerful line in the gospel of John that says, ‘Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for another”.

And make no mistake these are still boys in most ways. I remember the first time Pete told me that story, I was like ‘Wow… Pete you're behind enemy lines, you don't have any weapons, you don't know where you are or how far it is to the Allies, what was that night like.'

He smiled that big Pete Moran smile. He said, ‘Chuck, we were 19. We got drunk.' That is exactly right. We are never transformed in an instant. We just get flashes of virtue, almost in spite of ourselves.

A tremendous amount of trauma, some of the biggest challenges to character that we humans are given to know… And in the midst of that, incredible acts of valor. Where uncommon valor was a common virtue.

Many of these people have been sitting all around us for years and we have no idea what they have been through on our behalf. I took my Confirmands to the back of the church and I invite you to walk by there as well after the service. We have a framed picture with names. These are boys from our congregation that served in WW2. Our little congregation sent 48 boys overseas. Three of them never came home: Kenneth Nelson, Edward Stahl, and William Foster.

There is no glory in war but there is virtue in honor.

Because we are a Democratic Republic, the difficult moral questions about warfare, are borne by all of us. As you know, we are in the midst of some very complicated questions at the moment. What is the nature of a conflict with an enemy that wills your destruction but does not represent another nation-state? What is the status of these combatants- do we treat them like soldiers in a war against us or are they more like criminals that break the law?

What techniques of interrogation shall we allow? What shall we prohibit? Will we apply civilian standards of the Constitution that we use to defend and protect American citizens? Will we use standards that are derived from Military codes of conduct?

And we have a host of other complicated moral questions on the conduct of battle itself. What limits do you place on yourself when you fighting an enemy that intentionally shields itself in civilian centers? What rights do you extend to a fighters that not only do not recognize your rules but will use your rules cynically to exploit negative publicity against you?

We are on unchartered territory here, especially since we are having to resolve these moral puzzles in a context of a 24/7 news cycle where home video can be posted to a web site for all the world to see.

No, we are asking even more of our young men and women than at any time in human history and it will be much more difficult for us to get this right. But, we know in the broadest sense, what is required. We have to create a context for them in which they can operate with honor. We owe them the opportunity to do the honorable thing.

The vicissitudes of war will always be ragged and ambiguous. There never have been and never will be neat moral equations that we can apply with mathematical exactitude. Our men and women in uniform routinely have to live with their conscience because on the best days, we ask them to make split decisions in the midst of partial information with conflicting values at stake. On a good day, this is not easy.

I recently heard of an 80 year old man who was asked what constituted the good life. Money, power, prestige, entertainment? No, he said, ‘Being able to sleep with your conscience at my age'.

I'm pretty sure that at the end of our lives, the only thing that matters is honor. Marcus Aurelius once said that ‘reputation is what others know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.' That is God speaking to us. Aristotle was right. He once remarked that, ‘Honorable men and women care more about the Truth than what others happen to think about them.' At the end of the day, we must live with ourselves and the choices that we make that define our character.

With humility, may we so conduct ourselves in freedom that those who are tasked with the morally perilous task of defending our safety, may do their duty with honor. Amen.