"Mansions of the Lord" performed by the Cadet Glee Club of West Point

Excerpts from Allen West

This is Memorial Day weekend. It’s not a time to celebrate swimming pools opening, summer beginning, sales, BBQs, or road trips. This is not a time for us to greet each other saying “Happy Memorial Day” because for so many it is not.  

This is a time when we should especially dedicate ourselves to “HONOR Memorial Day” in remembrance of those who have given the last full measure of devotion, for which we should express our increased devotion.

This is a time when we MUST reflect on the unique and exceptional ideal that America is the land of the free since that day on Lexington Green, where seven made the ultimate sacrifice, we have — and always shall be —the home of the brave. The true one-percenters, many of whom lie in the Gardens of Stone willfully have given their all to this Constitutional Republic.
 
Take the few minutes and listen to the West Point Glee Club sing of that special place where our Warriors go…”The Mansions of the Lord”. And if that song, that reflection does not bring tears to your eyes, sadly, I must tell you, you have no comprehension of what it means to be an American.

 

Since September 11, 2001 we have witnessed a new breed, a reincarnation of our Greatest Generation step up to the plate against militant Islamic jihadism, Islamo-fascism. And as I attend various events this weekend, I see the results of their sacrifices. I see the children who’ve lost their moms and dads, the spouses who lost their loved ones. The mothers and gathers who’ve lost their sons and daughters over these past sixteen years.

And what have we experienced in the news this past week? Little girls savagely attacked in Manchester, England. A police chief beheaded and a Catholic priest and his parishioners abducted. A bus of innocent Egyptian Coptic Christians — twenty-six — brutally slaughtered following the forty Coptic Christians killed in two separate bomb attacks on Palm Sunday. There are those who admonish us not to “rush to judgment,” not to offend and to let coexistence, compassion, love win the day.” These are not the words of those who lie in the Gardens of Stone, where men and women understood the existence of evil, not just in our times, but throughout time, and took an oath to defend us against it.

This weekend we remember, we honor, we cherish those people — not the cowards. As President Theodore Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”