We Are A Nation of Leaders. We Take Losses, But We Refuse to Lose

I know it’s nearly a week out from last Sunday’s 10th Anniversary of 9/11. I actually posted this video on my FaceBook page last Sunday. It’s nagged me all this week that I didn’t post it here or on Chandler’s Watch.

This is the unknown story of that day … This is who and what we are. This is what separates the United States from all other countries, and all other societies. This IS American exceptionalism and ingenuity at its best. This IS personal responsibility exceeding government interference.

Our Coast Guard helped get the word out, and willing American citizens (many small businessmen) raced into action. In the long moments and hours after the WTC was attacked and collapsed more people were evacuated from Lower Manhattan in 9 hours than in 9 days from Dunkirk.

I heard a military/WWII historian once say about D-Day and the American soldiers charging the shores of Normandy, in a flesh and blood smoked storm of mortality, that thankfully it had been the U.S. Army coming ashore that day. In most cases officers were cut down almost immediately as they led their men off the boats and onto the beach. It was up to non-coms and even privates to pick up the command and force the remaining men forward up the beaches to get out of the Germans’ range of fire. This historian said that had it been British soldiers they might not have been as apt to take up the charge, individually and independently without new orders from the rear command, and push on for the mission, and for their own survival … That D-Day might have been lost as they scrambled to look for leadership and orders about what to do next without command directly on the ground beside them. At Pointe-du-Hoc when a climbing U.S. soldier was cut down by German gunfire from above on the wall, and fell to his death below, another soldier grabbed the rope and took his place on the climb, and then another. We take losses, but we refuse to lose.

In the last almost ten years we have seen our brave military men and women do extraordinary things in two war theaters. We constantly find ourselves asking, “Where do we get them from?”

(Medal of Honor recipients, Sgt. Dakota Meyer, and Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry … both took a leadership stance to save lives on the battlefield … pause for a photo in the White House after Thursday’s Medal of Honor ceremony.)

The people in the above video are just a small sample of where our brave men and women in the U.S. Military come from. On 9/11/01 they took the lead. Young men and women around the country followed the example of the first responders at Ground Zero and volunteered to selflessly and bravely serve this nation. And ten years into these two long wars they continue to offer their leadership.

We aren’t a perfect people, but we are good people. We aren’t a perfect nation, but we are the best nation in the history of the civilized world. We are a nation of leaders. Sometimes, unfortunately, we have to be reminded of it in the face of pain. It is why WE THE PEOPLE survive in spite of the lack of leadership within our own government.