We the Living
On March 21, 1945, a cemetery on Iwo Jima was dedicated to the fallen Marines and sailors of the 5th
Marine Division. Chaplain Roland Gittelsohn delivered a moving sermon with echoes from Abraham Lincoln’s address at another great battlefield Gettysburg:
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 fought with us and feared with us… Now they lie here silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate 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 only because men who lie here beneath us had the courage and strength to give their lives for us. 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. We can never forget what they did here.’… These men have done their job well. They have paid the ghastly price of freedom. If that freedom is once again lost… the unforgivable blame will be ours, not theirs, so it is we, ‘the living’ who are here to be dedicated and consecrated.519
Every person who has lived through war thinks of lost comrades with feelings of sadness and guilt. We survived, and they did not. Chaplain Gittelson articulately spells out our only recourse. We have to live our lives in honor of those who gave theirs. To do this, we have to be a force for peace in the world, in our communities, and in our families. In this noble endeavor we have an all-powerful ally the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
—Matthew 5:9