Re: Happy Memorial Day Week End

[Damian (Instructor)]

We are all going to die. But a lot of us pretend we’re not going to, and we live in cocoons of complacency seeking comfort.

Peace and freedom are incredibly fragile, and at any moment any one of us – soldier or not – may be called upon to defend it, be it from crooks or terrorists or whomever.

Soldiers remind me of this fact; that this world, despite the veneer of sophistication, is far from civilized. We act civilized, but at heart we battle the same dark forces in a mortal struggle that has never ceased since time began.

Evil exists, and it must be opposed. As long as it prowls the earth the lives of each one of us are in jeopardy. Soldiers remind me that this world is not the civilized place that professors in plush leather chairs imagine it to be. It is a rough dangerous place ruled by force.

Rush Limbaugh has an undeniable truth of life: The world is ruled by the aggressive use of force.

This has always been true, and it will remain true. Force requires violence and it requires death. It requires sacrifice.

However civilized and technologically advanced we may become, war will never become obsolete. Those of us who cannot or will not defeat the dark forces at work in our own hearts will have to be defeated by the rest of us who have overcome them within and now must confront them without.

It is easy to live in willing denial of the darkness around us. Soldiers remind us that there are enemies out there. And these enemies have to be killed. Or they will kill us.

People are going to die. You may even die. But it is better to die with honor, in support of dignity, than to live with the shame of apathy, turning a blind eye on the needs of others.

Tyranny is a natural state, just as negative thinking is. Freedom requires a constant, violent drop step forward, if you will. A determination to defeat.

Political correctness is nothing more than incremental surrender; buying time – for the enemy. There is nothing politically correct about putting a bullet in your enemy’s head.

This is the reality we live in, however removed from violent struggle you may appear to be. Evil can raise it’s head at any time and in any place. A soldier isn’t just ready to meet that challenge, but they have signed up to go and find that challenge. To seek it out and destroy it.

There is no America without her soldiers. There are no civilized, intellectual debates and naive pontifications without some guy somewhere brutally draining the life from the enemy. War is hell, and no amount of sophistication and enlightenment will change it’s ugly reality.

Soldiers are more alive than those they defend because they are willingly sacrificing their lives.

Jesus said that what you try to keep you will lose, and what you are willing to lose is what you will keep.

In Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, it echoes the same sentiment when it says that a samurai who leaves his house hoping to live will probably die, but the one who is ready to die will probably live.

It is this notion of sacrifice which sets a soldier apart. There is no honor without sacrifice.

And, frankly, all the words in the world do these men and women no justice.