The Cost of Freedom

I watched HBO's series, "The Pacific," this spring, was disgusted beyond belief at the cruelty and death of the war in the Pacific.  At the end of the last episode they updated the lives of the men that The Pacific was based upon.  Most had survived the war, but not life and as I read about their ordinary, mundane lives after the war and of their respective deaths in the years at the end of the 20th century, my eyes welled up in sadness, in gratitude, in recognition of my own mortality.  These were ordinary men thrust into an extraordinary theater of slaughter.  Now they are mostly gone and it is up to us to remember, so that as my people so stridently proclaim, "Never again."

A