[Rhodes22-list] Iwo Jima Re-visited

[Brad Haslett]

With the death of the Iwo Jima photographer two days ago the event is being
re-visited by many different quarters.  This is the prayer at the dedication
of the Iwo Jima cemetary by Rabbi Gittelsohn and is worth the read.

Brad

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Prayer at the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery Iwo Jima,
March 26, 1945, by LT Roland Gittelsohn, CHC, USNR

_____This is perhaps the grimmest, and surely the holiest task we have faced
since D-Day. Here before us lie the bodies of comrades and friends. Men who
until yesterday or last week laughed with us, joked with us, trained with
us. Men who were on the same ships with us, and went over the sides with us
as we prepared to hit the beaches of this island. Men who fought with us and
feared with us.
_____Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the man who could have
discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or
beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may rest now a man who was destined to
be a great prophet... to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty,
with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie here silently in this
sacred soil, and we gather to conse¬crate this earth in their memory. It is
not easy to do so. Some of us have buried our closest friends here. We saw
these men killed before our very eyes. Any one of us might have died in
their places. Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment
only because men who lie here beneath us had the courage and strength to
give their lives for ours. To speak in memory of such men as these is not
easy. Of them, too, can it be said with utter truth: "The world will little
note nor long remember what we say here. It can never forget what they did
here." No, our poor power of speech can add nothing to what these men and
the other dead of our division who are not here have already done. All that
we can even hope to do is follow their ex¬ample. To show the same selfless
courage in peace that they did in war. To swear that, by the grace of God
and the stubborn strength and power of human will, their sons and ours shall
never suffer these pains again. These men have done their job well. They
have paid the ghastly price of freedom. If that freedom be once again lost,
as it was after the last war, the unforgivable blame will be ours, not
theirs. So it is we, the living, who are here to be dedi¬cated and
conse¬crated.
_____We dedicate ourselves, first to live together in peace the way they
fought and are buried here in war. Here lie men who loved America because
their ancestors generations ago helps in her founding, and other men who
loved here with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers
escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and men,
Negroes and whites, rich men and poor... together. Here are Protestants,
Catholics, and Jews... together. Here no man prefers another because of his
faith or de¬spises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how
many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men is no
discrimination. No prejudice. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest
democracy. Any man among us, the living, who fails to understand that will
thereby betray those who lie here dead. Whoever of us lifts his hand in hate
against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in
the minority, makes of this ceremony and of the bloody sacrifice it
com¬memorates, an empty, hollow mockery. To this, then, as our solemn,
sacred duty, do we the living now dedicate ourselves: to the right of
Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, of white men and Negroes alike, to enjoy
the democracy for which all of them have here paid the price.
_____To one thing more do we consecrate ourselves in memory of those who
sleep beneath these crosses and stars. We shall not foolishly sup¬pose, as
did the last generation of America's fighting men, that victory on the
battlefield will automatically guarantee the triumph of democracy at home.
This war, with all its frightful heartache and suffering, is but the
beginning of our generation's struggle for democracy. When the last battle
has been won, there will be those at home, as there were last time, who will
want us to turn our backs in selfish isolation on the rest of organized
human¬ity, and thus to sabotage the very peace for which we fight. We
promise you who lie here: we will not do that! We will join hands with
Britain, China, Russia in peace, even as we have in war to build the kind of
world for which you died. When the last shot has been fired, there will
still be those whose eyes are turned backward, not forward, who will be
satisfied with those wide extremes of poverty and wealth in which the seeds
of another war can breed. We promise you, our departed comrades: This too we
will not permit. This war has been fought by the common man; its fruits of
peace must be enjoyed by the common man! We promise, by all that is sacred
and holy, that your sons–the sons of miners and millers, the sons of farmers
and workers, will inherit from your death the right to a living that is
decent and secure.
_____When the final cross has been placed in the last cemetery, once again
there will be those to whom profit is more important than peace, who will
insist with the voice of sweet reasonableness and appeasement that it is
better to trade with the enemies of mankind than, by crushing them, to lose
their profit. To you who sleep here silently, we give our promise: We will
not listen! We will not forget that some of you were burnt with oil that
came from American wells, that many of you were killed by shells fashioned
from American steel. We promise that when once again men seek profit at your
expense, we shall remember how you looked when we placed you reverently,
lovingly, in the ground. Thus do we memorialize those who, having ceased
living with us, now live within us. Thus do we consecrate ourselves, the
living, to carry on the struggle they began. Too much blood has gone into
this soil for us to let it lie barren. Too much pain and heartache have
fertilized the earth on which we stand. We here solemnly swear: this shall
not be in vain! Out of this, and from the suffering and sorrow of those who
mourn this, will come we promise the birth of a new freedom for the sons of
men everywhere. Amen.