I write this letter as an Army veteran, but it is not about me. It is about those who paid the ultimate price defending freedom. It is about heroes.
My Uncle Linn served with the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. He participated in the D-Day invasion where he landed in France in a plywood glider. He fought throughout France and Holland and in the Battle of the Bulge. In February 1945, he was killed in action. His final resting place is beneath a beautiful evergreen tree along Grant Drive in Arlington National Cemetery.
My wife’s second cousin Wendell served as a pilot in the Navy during the Vietnam War. He was shot down in the 1960s, captured and taken as a prisoner of war for five years until he was released in the early 1970s.
My close friend Howard’s younger brother David was drafted into the Army and fought in Vietnam. David was killed in action in 1968.
These men are heroes, as are all the men and women who served in our armed services in the past, those serving in our armed forces today and those who will serve in the future. None of them are “suckers or losers” as Donald Trump supposedly said. For anyone to imply them as such denotes a coward and one unworthy of being called an American.
Kenneth Powell
New Kensington