My Marathon Man

My son Andrew (the handsome guy on the right) completed his first marathon in 4 hours and 26 minutes. He ran the heartbreak marathon while deployed in Iraq with the Marines of the 1/3 and in a sand storm as you can see in the pictures. His only training has been a couple of 6 to 8 mile practice runs. Although he is a Marine, he hates running, but choose to run for a personal challenge. He has excelled at every challenge he has faced in the Marine, so for those of you who don't understand our military and what it is about, it is about making men out of boys and teaching them to face challenges with drive and purpose beyond their personal desires. Andrew will be home soon and wants to attend college. Before the Marines, I would have looked at that as a disaster. Now I view it as another challenge he will face and tackle with the same drive and determination he has learned in the Marines. He is my hero.

God Bless Our Military.

War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things. The decay and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more that his own personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill

"It is the soldier, not the poet, who gives us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the reporter, who gives us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us freedom to protest. It is the soldier who serves beneath the flag, who salutes the flag and whose coffin is draped in the flag that gives the demonstrators the right to burn the flag."