Submitted by Alan Stewart, Ontario, Canada

Foreword:

I just finished re-reading for the 5th or 6th time a book by William Manchester entitled “Goodbye Darkness.” (still available) and a passage near the end is reprinted below. I felt this was apropos as a counterpoint to the youth of America in the 1940s and those of today.

William Manchester (1922 – 2004) was a celebrated author/historian with over 18 published works, with Death of a President (John F.

Kennedy’s assassination) and American Caesar (biography of General Douglas MacArthur) being his most notable works. Goodbye Darkness chronicles his experiences as a U.S. Marine in the Pacific war along with a broad description of America’s efforts in that theater of war. He received near death combat wounds in the battle for Okinawa in 1945 and along with the totality of his in theater experiences he suffered recurring nightmares. The book describes a trip he took in 1978, visiting battle sites to exorcise those demons

from his memory, which, to add, he did successfully.

The last few pages are a poignant description of 1945 America. Just before he received his near fatal wounds he left a hospital where he had been recovering from a minor injury to rejoin his outfit and this is where his words are picked up.

And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man’s real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understand, at last, why I jumped hospital that Sunday thirty- five years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front and almost certain death.

It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home, They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die, is not a man at all. He is truly damned.

And as I stand on that crest I remember a passage from Scott Fitzgerald. World War 1, he wrote, “was the last love battle”; men, he said, could never “do that again in this generation.” But Fitzgerald died just a year before Pearl Harbor. Had he lived, he would have seen his countrymen united in a love that he had never known.

Actually love was only part of it. Among other things, we had to be tough, too. To fight World War 11 you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival ----- in 1940 two out of every five draftees had been rejected, most of them victims of malnutrition. And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together, that no strings were being pulled for anybody; the four Roosevelt brothers were in uniform and the sons of both Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closet adviser, and Leverett Saltonstall, one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, served in the Marine Corps as enlisted men and were killed in action.

But devotion overarched all this. It was a bond woven of many strands. You had to remember your father’s stories about the Argonne, and saying your prayers, and Memorial Day, and Scouting, and what Barbara Frietchie said to Stonewall Jackson. And you had to have heard Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge and to have seen Gary Cooper as Sergeant York. And seen how your mother bought day-old bread and cut sheets lengthwise and resewed them to equalize wear while your father sold the family car, both forfeiting what would be considered essential today so you could enter college.

You also needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something. You felt sure that all lands, given our democracy and our know-how, could shine as radiantly as we did. Esteem was personal, too; you assumed that if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity,

respected as well as adored by your children. Wickedness was attributed to flaws in individual characters, not to society’s shortcomings. To accept unemployment compensation, had it existed, would have been considered humiliating. So would committing a senile aunt to a state mental hospital. Instead, she was kept in the back bedroom, still a member of the family.

Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue. Mothers were beloved, fathers obeyed, Marriage was a sacrament. Divorce was disgraceful. Pregnancy meant expulsion from school or dismissal from a job. The boys responsible for the impregnation had to marry the girls. Couples did not keep house before they were married and there could be no wedding until the girl’s father approved. You assumed that gentlemen always stood and removed their hats when a woman entered the room. The suggestion that some of them might resent being called “ladies” would have confounded you.

You needed a precise relationship between the sexes, so that no one questioned the duty of boys to cross the seas and fight while girls wrote them cheerful letters from home, girls you knew were still pure because they had let you touch them here but not there, explaining that they were saving themselves for marriage.

All these and “God Bless America” and Christmas or Hannukkah and the certitude that victory in the war would assure their continuance into perpetuity --- all this led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell, and if it came to that, justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved them.

Later the rules would change. But we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know.

Postscript: The same basic rules are still being taught by many: Ben Shapiro, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Christina Somers, Larry Elder, Victor Davis Hansen, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Katie Hopkins, Mark Steyn, Dennis Prager, Mike Pence and of course Donald John Trump.