The History Channel has been playing the famous HBO series "Band of Brothers" all this weekend as their tribute to Memorial Day, coming up this Monday. Whenever it's on I stop most of what I'm doing and watch some of the episodes. It's filmed as battle-realistic as possible (based on the style of "Saving Private Ryan") but it's never like the real thing must have been. At the beginning of each episode there are brief interviews with men who were actually part of Easy Company in the 101st Airborne. They are old men now and they are sharing their feelings and stories with the audience. I watch them, try to picture them as young men who saw terrible things, and came away different. Some can speak easily about their experiences and others have a much more difficult time. You can see the pain on their faces as they talk of the deaths of friends. You realize that they can't tell you much but in the few sentences they speak, they tell you everything. There are times I find myself tearing up as I listen to them and I'm thankful to God that I've not gone through what they did. Sometimes you get the feeling that these men were the unlucky ones even though they survived the war....that they're envious of of their buddies who died because, at least, it's over for them. Those old men have to relive those experiences continually and for some there's no peace and they feel tremendous guilt for having survived, that there's something they could have done to save a buddy. But they'll never know.
These are the men that this holiday is for and they deserve all the thanks we can give them. They, and the men who served before them and who served after them.
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