Memorial Day Tribute

Today as we honor the military service of Americans who died from all wars, we should heed the voices of those who have experienced first-hand the horrors of war:

I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

~George McGovern

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

~Jean-Paul Sartre

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year’s time you could never guess the things which had taken place there.

…To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible.

If the common soldiers of each army could just get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week.

~William March, from Company K (1933)