Newspaper Article

D-Day's Legacy Victories Now Are as Heroic as Those Past

By Christopher Bassford. Christopher Bassford is

1994

Overview

Indeed, we seem to be determined to denigrate our most obvious accomplishments in the last war: The driving willpower of our commanders is dismissed as boorishness and egotism; arcane technical reports are deconstructed by technological illiterates to demonstrate how our high-tech weapons - despite the evidence of our eyes and of the outcome of combat - didn't work. The merciful resolution to end the slaughter is dismissed as a PR move to sell a slickly packaged \"Hundred-Hour War.\" The suspicion remains that our motives are not so respectable. In fact, it may be an error even tospeak of \"our\" and \"us.\" There is precious little sense of \"us\" in a nation that has come to worship the new ideal of autonomous individuality. Given human nature, this translates all too easily into a society of all against all, where each individual's 15 minutes of fame leads inevitably to 15 minutes of public humiliation. It does not help that our technological genius has brought us to a state of information overload. The excruciating if often erroneous detail with which we think we know our leaders breeds a phenomenal contempt. As someone said, \"No man is a hero to his valet.\"

• Publisher: Newsday LLC