@ZeekArkham Thank you Zeek! You are both great men! Please keep doing what you’re doing!
Off topic, I love Scott’s hair! I am a 6 year cancer survivor. Lost all mine and now it’s back with a vengeance. Just wanted to add simple humanity to this as well.
A surefire way to make a bad situation worse is to continue replaying it in your mind.
The damage is done. The only thing that matters now is making the best choice given your current position.
Next play mentality.
Eighty-two years ago today, freedom stood on the edge of extinction, and Allied forces stormed into hell to help save the world.
We will never forget the courage, the sacrifice, and the blood spilled on that fateful day.
On this Memorial Day Monday…
while the grills fire up and the flags snap half-heartedly in the suburban breeze…stop.
Cease the rote pageantry and confront the ledger scrawled in arterial red, the precise, unyielding calculus by which this Republic was purchased and continues to be insured. Not by the hollow rhetoric of politicians chasing votes, nor by the cheap pieties of civilians who have never heard incoming fire.
No.
It was purchased by men…young, clear-eyed, lethal…who chose the muzzle flash over the couch, who traded their finite pulse for the infinite continuation of ordered liberty under law.
They understood, in their marrow, what most never will: freedom is not a participation trophy handed out at birth. It is a blood tariff, paid in advance by a warrior caste that steps forward when the rest of the nation prefers to scroll.
History does not whisper this truth; it screams it across every theater of American arms. From the slaughter pens of Antietam, where 23,000 fell in a single September day and the cornfields ran crimson, to the black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima, where Marines clawed inch by bloody inch against an enemy sworn to fight to the last man.
From the frozen meat grinder of Chosin Reservoir…where Marines fought through -30 degrees and Chinese human-wave assaults, leaving their dead stacked like cordwood under the snow…to the dust-choked passes of Korengal Valley, where a new generation traded lead with fanatics who measured time in IED detonations.
Add Gettysburg’s corpse-choked fields, the hedgerows of Normandy where Rangers scaled Pointe du Hoc under machine-gun fire, the Ia Drang where air cavalry met the NVA in the first great test of helicopter warfare, the streets of Fallujah where urban combat turned houses into kill zones.
These were not accidents of history.
They were deliberate transactions: young men who looked into the void of probable death, ran the numbers, and signed the check anyway.
They did not die for “democracy” as some hollow slogan peddled by cable-news anchors.
They died enforcing the lethal arithmetic that the Republic endures only because someone, somewhere, was willing to kill and be killed so the rest could argue about it in safety.
Psychology does not lie, and it is merciless here.
The vast majority of citizens operate under a comfortable delusion, anesthetized by prosperity they never earned and shielded by oceans and oceans of other people’s blood.
Cognitive dissonance is their armor: they enjoy the fruits of empire while scorning the imperial guard that secured them.
They virtue-signal about “peace” from air-conditioned rooms, never once reckoning with the raw transaction cost.
Meanwhile, the few who volunteered for the meat grinder…the ones who raised their right hand and meant it…understood the final, existential bargain. They stared down mortality without flinching, calculated the price of continuance, and paid it in full.
That is not romantic sentiment; it is the highest form of realism. The rest of us are merely beneficiaries…soft, distracted, often ungrateful heirs to a patrimony of controlled ferocity.
We sleep soundly because they did not.
To the forgetful, the revisionists, the parlor-room critics who treat Memorial Day as just another long weekend of beer and sales circulars: your indifference is venom, but it is weak, diluted venom, the kind that only poisons the soul of the nation that tolerates it.
History’s judgment is far sharper, colder, and permanent. The fallen do not require your applause or your performative hashtags.
They demand your precision.
They demand you remember…with intellectual honesty and without the comforting lies…that every right you casually exercise, every comfort you casually consume, every late-night scroll through your digital distractions was bought with compound interest in the currency of young men who will never grow old, never hold their children, never see another sunrise.
They paid so you could whine about “the system” from the very system their sacrifice preserved.
We do not mourn them as victims of circumstance or “needless war.” That is the language of cowards and revisionists who would rather cheapen the price than face it.
We honor them as the lethal architects of our continuance…steel-eyed, duty-bound, unapologetic.
They were not pawns; they were the tip of the spear, the quiet professionals who carried the Republic on their shoulders when the bill came due.
This nation’s pride is not abstract or inherited like some antique heirloom.
It is forged in their sacrifice, tempered in the fire of their resolve, and sustained by the quiet, ferocious knowledge that when the bill comes due again…and it always does…others of their kind will step forward to pay it in the same red currency.
Lest we forget is not a cliché to be embroidered on a pillow.
It is a warning etched in stone and bone.
The Republic endures only as long as we refuse to cheapen their price, only as long as we retain the clarity to distinguish between the warrior who bled and the civilian who merely benefited.
Anything less is national suicide by amnesia.
Tomorrow is Armed Forces Day — a chance to honor every American still standing the watch.
As a soldier who survived an IED in Afghanistan on my own Alive Day, I know the weight of that uniform. Grateful beyond words for those who serve today.
The mission never stops. 🇺🇸
Tag who you’re honoring and tell us why in the replies! #DutyFirst
@goodreads I am about to finish Dissection of a Murder by Jo Murray. Loving it. Loved it. BOTM subscription is awesome.
Next book will be Burning Side.