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May 30, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
35:07
Some Gave All: Why Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day are different.
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
And today is a very special day.
Today is Memorial Day.
And this is not a normal episode of the Doug Collins Podcast.
I want to emphasize Memorial Day today.
I want to talk about Memorial Day.
But first off, Memorial Day is a day in which we set aside for those who have given their life in service to this country.
There is no more recognizable sound To a military person or even a non-military person, when you hear the notes to taps begin to play, you know the solemn nature of what's going on.
You know that it's connected to a death.
And I wanted to start this episode today with those 24 notes. .
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. . .
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I'll be honest with you folks, I can't hear those without it bringing back a lot of emotion.
The moment those first two or three notes hit, it brings back a lot of memories.
It brings back memories of being in Iraq, doing memorial services, having those that we lost, that you saw that were living and then passed away, those that were brought to us that were already dead from the battlefield.
When you're that far away from your home and everything else going on and you hear and you do a service, a memorial service, and at the end of that service, when you hear those notes of taps, it makes an impression on you.
It's one that I cannot shake.
And to this day, I don't care where I'm at or what I'm doing, if I hear that being played, it's a very visceral reaction to me.
My eyes get wet.
It is a sadness, but it is a beautiful sadness realizing that life is so precious and that death is something that affects us all.
Memorial Day is one that many will go out and quote celebrate.
It is something that we take off and we do that and it's just sort of the beginning of summer in many a sense.
But Memorial Day is something you remember.
Memorial Day is not Veterans Day.
Veterans Day is when you celebrate the service of everybody who served.
That's when you celebrate everybody who stepped forward, put on the uniform, went out there and served, whether peacetime, wartime, anytime else.
Veterans Day is that day.
Memorial Day is different.
And unfortunately, I see too many times I see people get this mixed up.
They get it mixed up and they say, oh, today on Memorial Day, we're honoring all those who served.
No, you're not.
Please don't do that.
Memorial Day is when you honor those who have given their life in service to this country.
Veterans Day is when you actually honor those who serve.
Now, in looking at the timing of the Memorial Day, it's been celebrated in many ways since the Civil War.
After World War I, it became more universal, celebrated throughout the entire country, and now none in the last Monday in May.
And it is a time in which we bring together those to remember the service that has been given.
Interestingly enough, the story of TAPS actually comes out of the Civil War.
The whole bugle call, it's not a song, it's actually a bugle call, came from generally attributed to General Butterfield.
In the Civil War, came out of the old extinguishing of the lights.
I think that's very appropriate.
The extinguishing of the lights by a bugle call out of France is the end of the night extinguished the lights that signaled that we, you know, lights out, bedtime, we're going, it's time for rest.
And it was translated out of that, it came out of that, and Butterfield wanting a different Bugle call for his command.
There was a lot of bugle calls out there.
He wanted this one to stand out for him.
What is interesting is its use by that.
The word taps, as it is called, does not come from the bugle.
The taps is actually the drum, the three tap on the drum, which when a bugle was not available, that was the extinguisher lights or that was the nighttime call, was on the drum itself.
And that, in essence, became tap.
Instead of tapping the drum, it was taps.
It just shortened into taps.
Taps, over time, developed into and was used in the Civil War for the first time at a funeral in the Peninsula Campaign.
It was called upon to be used.
It was used during a burial of a cannoneer.
And since then, it began to be adopted by the Army of the North, the United States Army, as it come through Virginia.
And it began to be used in...
In services throughout the war.
In 1891 was the first official, if you would, use of taps in a funeral and now it has become a standard Use, if you would, in funerals at Arlington and other places around the country.
Probably for many, one of their largest memories of the taps was at John F. Kennedy's funeral.
And they heard it, they saw the solemnity of it.
It is just a...
It's a powerful transition.
TAPS is associated with Memorial Day.
You'll hear it a great deal.
And the respect for TAPS is something that needs to be ingrained into our society because when that is played, and especially for those service members that it's played for, those who've given their life for this country, it takes that whole, as Lincoln said, We can never erase that from who we are and what we are as a country.
So this day on Memorial Day, I encourage you to be with your family and celebrate the freedoms that you have, but remember that the day is about service.
The day is about those who have given their life for us.
Over time, Many presidents and many others have put down words in which, you know, speeches that are given.
And I want to read, Ronald Reagan was exceptionally good at this.
Oliver Wendell Holmes did.
He served in, actually, the Civil War.
He gave several speeches about the dead and this aspect of remembrance of the soldiers who died.
Reagan did that very well, too.
One of his more...
And during remarks came in speeches on Memorial Day.
And the eloquence I want to just give to you here on this Memorial Day podcast and the words of Reagan, the words of others to just draw into what it means to serve, what our country owes these who've given their life.
The words of Reagan are pretty amazing when he talks about this.
He says, as he starts his speech, he said, The willingness of some to give their lives so that others may live never fails to evoke a sense of wonder and mystery.
One gets that feeling here on this hallowed ground, and I have known that some poignant feeling as I have...
That same poignant feeling as I looked out across the row of White Crosses and Stars of David in Europe, in the Philippines, in the military cemeteries, here in our own land.
Each one marks the resting place of an American hero.
And in my lifetime, the heroes of World War I, the Doughboys, the GIs of World War II, or a Korea or Vietnam, they span several generations of young Americans, all different yet all alike.
And like the markers above their resting places, all are alike in a truly meaningful way.
Winston Churchill set those of he knew in World War II. He said that they seemed to be the only young men who could laugh and fight at the same time.
A great general in that war called them our secret weapon, just the best darn kids in the world.
Each died for a cause he considered more important than his own life.
Well, they didn't volunteer to die.
They volunteered to defend the values of which men have always been willing to die if need be.
The values that make up what we call civilization.
How they must have wished in all the ugliness that war brings that no other generation of young men to follow would have to undergo the same experience.
He goes on to say, as we honor their memory today, let us pledge that their lives, their sacrifice, their valor shall be justified and remembered for as long as God gives life to this nation.
And let us also pledge to do our utmost to carry out what must have been their wish, that no generation of young men will ever have to share their experiences or repeat their sacrifices.
Earlier today, with the music that we had heard and that of our national anthem, I can't claim to know the words of all the national anthems in the world, but I don't know of any others but ends with the question and a challenge as ours does.
Does the flag still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Reagan makes a very valuable and very poignant statement there that the very deaths of these individuals in service to our country Are the very reasons for the freedoms that exist today and the very thing that is talked about, does a flag still fly over the land of the free and the home of the brave?
That is a question for each of us.
It is about the uniting of our country.
I've talked many times on this podcast about the common values of Americans, that we came together from many, out of many, one.
It's a very, you know, e pluribus unum.
That is who we are, that we've came together as Americans.
Washington talked about it in his final address.
We've heard presidents and politicians talk about it for years.
The reality is that it is the service to our country, that the service that is made and the sacrifice is made by those who have given all for our country that actually binds us together.
In understanding that, and I think something that's very important that I want to emphasize here is he talks about the uniqueness of the marker or the marker above each person telling, frankly, a different story.
And that is true.
Each of those people had their own personalities, their own uniqueness, their own likes, their own love.
They left people back home.
Some were married.
Some had kids.
Some did not.
Some had just started their life.
Others had already began a life and it went.
And it reminds us that each and every day that when we get up and we go forward in this country with the freedoms that we have and the opportunities that we have, even given troubles and circumstances and problems that we have, It is those that have said, I will fight for these values, that I will fight for these countries, I will fight for what I believe that the freedom of America operates on, is giving us that freedom today.
And another speech that Reagan gave during this time In a Memorial Day speech, he talks about those individuals, and I want to emphasize what he sort of talks about here.
He talks about it being in Arlington that a sharecropper's son who became a hero to lonely people, Joe Lewis, came from nowhere, but he knew how to fight.
And he galvanized the nation in the days after Pearl Harbor when he put on the uniform of his country and said, I know we'll win because we're on God's side.
Audie Murphy is here.
Audie Murphy of the wild, wild courage.
For what else would you call it when a man bounds the top of a disabled tank, stops an enemy advance, saves lives, rallies his men, and all of it single-handedly.
When he radioed for artillery support and was asked how close the enemy was to his positions, he said, wait a minute, I'll let you speak to them.
These are the stories.
He brought these up.
And I think it's really interesting that he made these in his speech about Memorial Day about the life that they lived.
I have, in my time as a chaplain, in my time as a pastor, I've had the honor of standing in front of many at a funeral.
Now, I call it an honor because it is there to honor the life of others and to share a moment of personal grief with a family and friends.
Some are very hard.
Some are not something you would want to go through.
They're either deep friends of mine.
I have done funerals of those that touch me deeply.
I've done funeral members for family members.
I've done memorial services for folks that needed somebody to come in and that I didn't know as well.
But each of them requires that we understand the life that is given.
And if I can emphasize anything else that I say to folks on days of these services, is I say that death did not bring them to the funeral home.
Death did not bring them to the church or to the gravesite or wherever the service may be.
It was not death realistically that brought them there.
It was the life of the person that brought them there.
I love the way Reagan talks about this, and he talks about it in such a way that he gave the examples of life.
He gave the audacity of Audie Murphy to say, look, I'm up here doing this by myself.
You want to talk to the enemy?
They're right here.
I need help.
But he was doing it willingly.
Talk about Joe Lewis.
You talk about others.
The nameless others, as Reagan has mentioned in other places, about the crosses of those who don't have their unique story told.
But I'll guarantee you, you go to any military funeral, you go to any military cemetery across this world, especially those coming out of World War II and World War I, it is in those times that That you remember that each of those people, each of those people buried have a story.
They have a story of life.
They have a story that somewhere along the line, somebody would miss them.
And Memorial Day is a remembrance.
It's a remembrance of those who left their homes and went overseas many times to fight for our country, to fight for freedoms around the world, and they never made it back home.
They got on a plane or they got on a ship.
They left not knowing when or if they would come home.
Some never did.
I love the fact that Reagan, in this speech, actually tried to make a human face to those that were there.
He also talks about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who I've mentioned before talked at length about those who fought In Oliver Winter Holmes, who was a jurist and a fighter for right, he fought in the Civil War.
He said, a poet searching for an image of true majesty could not rest until he seized upon Holmes dissenting in a sordid age.
Young Holmes served in the Civil War.
He might have been thinking of the crosses and stars of Arlington when he wrote, at the grave of a hero we end, not with sorrow, at the inevitable loss, but with the In other words, what Holmes is saying is that we take inspiration and we take commitment from those who have went before.
From those who have taken up and have sacrificed for us, we're now to take that and go forward.
Ourselves.
That's what life is.
That's what is when we deal with death.
And there's been a lot of it lately.
And you've seen tragedies all over the screen.
But when we deal with Memorial Day today, my question to us as a country, my question to you as this podcast listener listening to us on Memorial Day or maybe a little bit of a day after, is what is your commitment to making this country the very best it can be based on the sacrifices of those who gave their life so that we could have the freedoms that we have today starting back over 200 years ago?
It is that giving that should put into us a want to give back.
Because once we have been given something and understand what we have been given, then it is something special.
I want to read...
The last part of this speech because I think it encapsulates a lot of what we've been saying.
He said, Not far from here is the statue of three servicemen, three fighting boys of Vietnam.
It too has a majesty and more.
Perhaps you've seen it, three rough boys walking together, looking ahead with a steady grace.
There's something wounded about them, a kind of resigned toughness, but there's an unexpected tenderness too.
At first you don't really notice, but then you see it.
The three are touching each other, as if they're supporting each other, helping each other on.
I know that the veterans of Vietnam will gather today, some of them perhaps by the wall, and they're still helping each other on.
They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam.
Boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of a battle.
It was often our poor who fought in that war.
It was those unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march.
They learned not to rely on us.
They learned to rely on each other.
And they were special in another way.
They chose to be faithful.
They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time.
They chose to believe and answer the call of duty.
They had the wild, wild courage of youth.
They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age, and they stood for something.
And we owe them something, those boys.
We owe them a first, a promise, that just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither ever will we.
And there are other promises.
We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance.
And we owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and perhaps a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges, and the only way to meet them and maintain peace is staying strong.
That, of course, is the lesson of this century.
A lesson learned in Sudetenland, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Cambodia.
If we really care about peace, we must stay strong.
If we really care about peace, we must, through our strength, demonstrate our unwillingness to accept an ending of our peace.
We must be strong enough to create peace where it does not exist and strong enough to protect where it does.
That's the lesson of this century.
And I think of this day.
And that's all I wanted to say.
The rest of my contribution is to leave This great place to its peace.
a peace that it is earned.
Reagan captured the very essence of service.
Yes.
But if you will allow me these last few minutes, I want to make this very personal, in a sense of just sharing my thoughts.
For those who are watching the podcast, you can see the video, and I'm holding in my hand an Air Force Times from 2008. In 2008, in November, I picked up this Air Force Times while I was serving in Balad, Iraq.
And every week...
That I would get up and I would get the paper every time it would come out.
I would flip through it and I'd flip through a certain section and I'd come to this section right here.
And across the bottom it would have the human toll is what it was called.
And it would have pictures of those who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I had been in country for about three months.
And we went through about a two and a half week span that was tough.
Our convoys had been hit.
Balad was the central place of the hospital where they would bring the wounded.
And every Monday night, I had hospital duty.
Normally, I was out on the flight line talking with the men and women in the Army and the Air Force.
We were all there together.
I talked to the flyers.
I talked to the security forces.
I was out with men, with them, being a chaplain.
But on Monday night, I had to go to relieve our hospital chaplain because we never left the hospital unattended.
And for about a three-week span, it seemed like every Monday night was one casualty after another, one mass casualty, one problem after another.
And I remember going in, and it began to wear on me.
And I remember on that week, that last week of October into the first week of November, and when I picked up this Air Force Times edition and I looked around the human toll, And on the week of 24 October through 30 October, three were killed, seven were wounded, and we had others in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
I remember going in and seeing, visiting the hospital ward of them that had come in from earlier, and one of our units had been hit, and we had several of the members there.
And I remember looking at...
Them and knowing that some we had lost, others they were trying to get back home.
The great men and women at the Blod medical facility there had over a 98% survival rate that if the heroes came in under the flag, what they call the Heroes Highway, 98% of them would be living when they left to go to Germany and back to the United States.
Now, some died later when they got back to the United States, but they had over a 98% survival rate if they made it under that flag alive.
When I saw what was happening, I saw the injuries.
They were things that I'll never forget.
But this week's and these couple of weeks coming in had really made an impression on me.
And I remember being beside the bed and the chaplain always comes in.
We talk, we share with the nurses and others, and we pray with those that are there.
We listen to them, we hear them.
And there was this one young man that he couldn't talk.
He was not conscious.
He was alive, but he was not conscious.
I'll never forget his hair, his eyes, as he was laying there.
And I had one of his buddies was just in the other side of the hallway, and I had just talked to him, and the only thing, his buddy was very much wounded and getting ready to be transferred to Germany, but the only thing he wanted to know was about his other brothers-in-arms.
He only wanted to know what was going on And one of his closest friends was just on the other side.
One of his other comrades was just on the other side, and he was not doing well at all.
In fact, the nurses and doctors had done everything they could to keep him alive.
He left the week before.
They did get him on a transport.
They got him back to Germany, from Germany then to the United States.
And I was coming out of that week, a week later, picked up the Air Force Times and I was reading these and I was looking across the faces.
And it hit me at a moment that of those faces, I had actually laid eyes out of the nine that were here.
I'd actually laid eyes on four of them.
And one was the young man.
Who didn't speak.
Because he was wounded so badly he couldn't.
It was the one that the other members had been asking about.
What I found out later was he actually made it home and he died with family.
So many of them did not.
Thank you.
We tried our best to get them home but Unfortunately, many did die in Iraq and Afghanistan before they could be surrounded by the family that loved them.
When I saw that he did not make it, and I saw that he did make it home, there was a sense of at least satisfaction that our doctors and nurses had done everything they possibly could.
But it was a reminder for me, and I kept that Air Force time, and I keep it to this day, of the sacrifices of young men and women Who died because they were fighting for freedom.
They were fighting because they were told to go and they said yes.
They did not say no.
They did not say I'll think about it.
They went and they did their job and in doing so gave as Lincoln has said the last full measure of devotion.
I'll carry that paper with me Until I pass.
And then hopefully my kids will take it and remember what these folks did.
This is just one small sampling, but it's my sampling.
It was me.
Because when I was in Congress in Washington, D.C., there's a big wall in the Rayburn office building.
It has the names of those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And as I would pass there going to the Judiciary Committee, I would look up and I could see these names.
These names that I knew.
These names that I had prayed with.
These names that I had watched.
That is Memorial Day.
That is why I am so adamant about the difference in Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
And for some of you, you may not understand, and I respect that.
But these who gave their life deserve a day of remembrance.
Memorial Day.
Memorial Day is that day that we remember what they did.
I don't take the paper out very often because as you can tell, every time I do, it's an emotional one.
But every time I do take that paper out, It recommits me to understanding that those who give their life for this country, who serve this country, and that happens to them, they are another block in what makes this country great and really the light and freedom that goes around the world.
It is why I'm able to do a podcast.
It's why you're able to listen to a podcast.
It's why you're able to go to work.
It's why we have the government we do.
It's why we're able to do the things in life that we do.
And yes, this is, as I said before, is not like any of my other podcasts, but I didn't want it to be.
I wanted it to be one in which we remember those who gave their life for our country.
I'm going to end with a poem, a reminder.
It's a reminder of the place that sometimes is forgotten, but it's a reminder of all that they have It is a soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is a soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is a soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to protest.
It is a soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is a soldier, not the politician, who has given us the right to vote.
If it is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
For all of those who have given their life, for the family members that still remember them, and for a day called Memorial Day, it is a day of remembrance.
Go out and celebrate life with your family.
If you have the day off, take that time.
Because remember, those who gave their life for you wanted you to have that life because their life meant something as well.
Find a way to remember it.
Find a way to give thanks for the fact that you have the freedoms you have.
And let Memorial Day be something that you remember from here on out.
As a day of remembrance for what you have and what others have given.
God bless you.
And before we leave, those 24 notes, I will play again.
I'll see you next time. .
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