Alex Horton: Honoring the Exchange of Life for Life
Our buddy, Alex Horton, has a new piece up at the New York Times that you should read. It’s about what the folks we offer this single day of national remembrance bought and paid for us;
Memorial Day for those of us who have fought is not simply a broad recognition of the sacrifices rendered by the dead, but an understanding of the exchange of life for life. Chevy’s gift to us wasn’t so much his skill or his grit. It was an endowment of time, at first measured in the seconds after his Stryker was toppled to its side. He absorbed the beginning of an ambush that could have killed more men. Those seconds he bought us stretched into minutes and hours, transformed into days, weeks. They built years. His gift was a nanosecond exerted under thousands of pounds of pressure that crippled steel and broke his body, but the effects stretch into the infinite
Make sure you read the whole thing.
Category: Veterans Issues
Alex’s blog was great, but I’m very glad that the VA offered him a role to provide the perspective that we know know and understand, but few not in uniform do.
This was a good piece; anytime he writes about Chevy, you can feel the emotion in his words.
Wow, that was good. May God’s eternal peace be with both SSgt Williams, Cpl Chevalier and all those that have paid the ultimate price.