Sunday is D-Day plus 76 years.
And on Memorial Day this week we honored and mourned all the men and women who’ve died while serving in our military.
So maybe it’s a good time for politicians and pundits from both sides of the aisle to quit pointing fingers at each other for a day and start thinking about what marking the date June 6, 1944 is all about.
It’s about honoring all those young soldiers who gave their lives for us so many years ago in World War II.
It’s about remembering all those brave young men who jumped out of airplanes and stormed the beaches of a foreign country, not knowing the language but knowing they were there to free the world from Hitler and his armies.
There are only about 300,000 World War II vets still living, and they’re all in their 90s and 100s.
We thank them each year on Memorial Day and D-Day and Veterans Day, but we need to thank them every day.
It doesn’t matter where they served – Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever – they deserve our constant and bipartisan respect.
On D-Day I always think about my father and what he did to serve the country during World War II.
He badly wanted to enlist in the Army but without his glasses he was legally blind.
Because he knew he’d never pass the Army’s eye exam, he went out and memorized the eye charts. It didn’t matter which line he was asked to read because he had it memorized.
Because of his bad eyes he couldn’t go overseas and he ended up serving in California, where he did more than 300 training films for the Army.
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.