Honoring All Who Served

Oliver North's Touching Tribute to Veterans.  The average age of the young American serving in uniform today is 20½ years of age, making him about 10 months older than his grandfather who would have served in my war. He's a high school graduate, he's a volunteer; he is brighter, better educated, better trained, led and equipped than any soldier, sailor, airman, guardsman, or marine of any country in history. He goes to work wearing an 8-pound Kevlar helmet, a 45-pound flak jacket, and today in Kandahar it was 110˚ and he'll hike up those hills and walk back down them without complaining. He's been taught chemistry and physics and ballistics and avionics and electronics to operate and maintain the most sophisticated weapons and equipment ever designed by the hand and mind of man. He can use his body like a weapon and his weapon like part of his body, and he can take a life or save one because he has been so remarkably well trained. The images of the young marines and soldiers and sailors and airmen going to Bible studies and religious services aren't staged; they're all real. They are all spontaneous and nearly all of them are initiated by those young Americans in harms way. When they gather in prayer circles and huddle up before a mission, they are not going out to play football, they are going into mortal combat and they know that some of them are liable not to come back and they do it because the have faith. Just for grins, how many of you raised a teenage boy? ... Think about getting a teenage boy to clean his own room, do his own laundry, fix his own meals, clean up everything without a size 10 in the backside and yet that same youngster today washes and mends his own clothing, feeds himself, takes care of cleaning his weapon, cleaning himself he's totally self sufficient. The kid who once wouldn't share a candy bar with his little brother now gives away his last drop of water to a wounded comrade, his only MRE to a hungry Afghan kid, and splits his ammo with mate in a firefight.   I always save this one for last when I am explaining to young people about who they are for so few of them know the truth of these youngsters. This is a frame take from my footage on the 6th of April 2003. Baghdad is the smoke pall you see in the background. The Marine unit I am with embedded is the van, the lead element in the attack on the Eastern Quarter. We're about 15 miles outside of Baghdad and a Republican Guard's regiment ambushes this Marine rifle company, they spin their humvees around, and there is a gunfight that occurs between this regiment and this rifle company. And in the midst of the beaten zone, the area where the intersecting bullets are crossing, a United States Navy corpsman whom I had first met in Kandahar in 2001 rushes into the battlefield, right through the fire, drags two wounded Marines out, and carries them on his shoulder to a helicopter that's landed in the roadway. At this footage right here (above) I am standing on the ramp of that helicopter. And this corpsman who has rushed no twice before and brought these two wound back now has a third one. Now off to the right hand side as you look at the (photo) a Reuters news team sets up their tripod. They're videotaping him going in and out. And as this guy staggers back into the gunfight, one of them shouts out, "Hey mate, what did you do that for? Didn't you notice..." in other words 'you stupid American' "Didn't you notice that wasn't a Marine?" If you'll look carefully at that photograph you'll see that the wounded warrior, who has already been bandaged up by that United States Navy corpsman, isn't a Marine. It's a wounded Iraqi soldier and this US Navy corpsman has rushed into the battlefield to save his life. And so... in response to the Reuters news crew the Navy corpsman gives them a gesture... and he says, "Didn't you notice? He's wounded.  That's what we do. We're Americans!"