Barnie Day was a Democratic delegate from Patrick County from his election in 1997 through the 2001 session. A former county administrator and business owner, he is now a banker. General Assembly binges on amendments It's what political columnists do Brother, can you spare a dime? 'Gilmore's Ghost' revived for a new model year House, Senate should pass HB 2742: this one will save lives Odd juxtapositions Older Barnie Day columns Join A Discussion Reprint Email this Article

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

As this millennium approached and the last century wound down, a lot of new books and films took a retrospective look at the role America has played in world affairs in the last 100 years. It is still an interesting look back. We truly have lived in the American Century.

I watch and read a lot of history, and as I mull over things, I am struck by two facts: the astounding genius of our founding fathers and the debt we as a people owe our war veterans. Neither can be overstated.

I honestly believe that divine intervention guided the proceedings in Philadelphia more than 200 years ago when our form of government was laid out in our Constitution. It was a miracle, by any measure. And a resilient one that continues to endure to this day. If you don’t think it still works, think again.

It alone has not given us the sweet life we know, however. It has not operated in a vacuum. What has made our Constitution meaningful, given substance to it, is the willingness of generations of Americans to die for it. Not to be merely inconvenienced by it, not to miss a day or two of work over it -- but to die for it.

We are not a perfect country, nor a perfect people, and we must always guard against letting the belief that we are close our thinking. I will tell you, though, with firm and certain belief, that our system of democracy is miles and miles ahead of anything that runs second.

Tom Brokaw a few years ago published “The Greatest Generation,” a remarkable tribute to ordinary men and women in an extraordinary time -- to Americans who fought, and died, in World War II. It won’t be too many years before this generation passes from the earth forever, and leaves us forever in its debt.

Americans have died around the world in many wars and conflicts, but perhaps the stakes were highest in World War II.

I have come to understand that the people of my father’s generation, many of them aging and in declining health, made sacrifices in World War II that most of us can’t imagine. Many of these veterans came home, picked up the pieces of their lives and went on as if nothing had happened. But tens of thousands of them went to neat-rowed cemeteries in Europe, to unmarked resting places in the steaming jungles of Asia, to watery graves in oceans around the world.

These dead joined Americans from countless conflicts -- the War for Independence, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sixty years ago, on Feb. 19, 1945, 70,000 extraordinary, ordinary Americans landed on a four mile by two mile spit of sand in the Pacific theatre -- a tiny island called Iwo Jima.

If you drive 60 miles an hour, it would take you four minutes to drive the length of of the site. Sixty years ago it took the men 36 days to cover that distance, and 6,821 died in the process. As did about 20,000 battle-hardened Japanese; they were ordinary Japanese in another life but as soldiers, oh, so extraordinary, too.

Sixty years ago today, on Feb. 23, 1945, a photographer named Joe Rosenthal snapped the picture that would become the most reproduced image in the history of photography, an iconic image that will help us remember forever the extraordinary, ordinary soldiers who died there.