The Cost of Freedom

 a Veterans Day message, from Robert Stokely to America

People say freedom isn't free, yet everyday most enjoy freedom at no cost to themselves. But for the American Soldier and their families the cost is great.

Some bear physical wounds and scars while others bear emotional wounds that never heal.

Some lose irreplaceable time with their children for events like birth, each birthday, winning homerun, first place at band competition and many other daily events can't be adequately captured by video, even in real time.

Some come home so changed, that they can't re-adapt to what they left, nor can those at home adapt to the person who came home.

Some face grave financial hardship which alters family prosperity for a lifetime.

In the end, all who serve and their families pay a price for freedom.

I have been asked what I thought the real cost of the fight for freedom was. Mike Stokely would have made a great dad, granddad, and uncle, for he was a great husband, son, brother, grandson, nephew and cousin. 144 years and six generations before Mike Stokely's death, William G. Stokely died as a prisoner of war in the Civil War. There will be no 144 years and six generations from Mike Stokely, for he had no children. The sound at Christmas, birthdays, vacations, and holidays will not hear the happy cries of children saying watch me daddy or hey uncle Mike. Mike Stokely will never be asked "who gives this woman in marriage"? Mike Stokely will not even get to grieve and shed a tear at the grave of his parents. For Mike Stokely and our family, the cost of freedom is a lifetime of love.

Soldiers do not serve for money, fame, or future. Soldiers are the few who care enough to sacrifice some or all of their life so that the majority do not have to.

Remembering them one day a year is little enough to give back. To the Veterans who lived to come home, thank you for serving and thank you for living. To the fallen, especially my son, I can never thank you enough for what you have given and the best I can do is to remember and honor your sacrifice.

Robert Stokely

Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:

"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene."

In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.

Thanks to Mack Welford for reminding me of this great poem.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm