
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 10, 1994                    TAG: 9406100012 
SECTION: FRONT                     PAGE: A18    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Medium 
DATELINE: 940610                                 LENGTH:

D-DAY VETERANS SACRIFICED FOR WHAT?

{LEAD} As a D-Day veteran who received terrible wounds on that day so long ago, I am thankful in a sense I survived but grieve for my fallen comrades for reasons just beyond that they made the supreme sacrifice. For amidst all the observances and tributes on the 50th anniversary, I ask myself: What for?

Yes, popular history tells us we fought to liberate the continent of Europe from the yoke of Nazi tyranny. Yet immediately in the years following the war we were engaged in a Cold War with communism, something which I feel to this day a more moral and intelligent diplomacy on the part of our wartime leaders could have prevented.

{REST} In these 45 years, we fought two prime wars, Korea and Vietnam, in which we lost 10 times as many dead than at Normandy on D-Day.

Nevertheless, the most important and salient factor in all of this is the deplorable and disgraceful state our nation is in today. Steadily we have been subjected to being conquered from within by sinister and alien forces. The result has been an atrocious crime rate, cultural deterioration, lowering of educational standards, minority- and gender-directed racism and sexism and political corruption in all spheres of national life. Neither the Nazis or Communists could ever have achieved such results upon our once great nation.

So this veteran must ask himself what those thousands of young dead lying in Normandy and elsewhere would say if suddenly they arose from their graves and looked back over the thousands of miles of ocean to that once-great land they left so long ago.

Might we not hear a chorus of thousands of young voices crying: ``What for? What did we die for? This?''

An irony in history, indeed.

MURRAY TELTON

Norfolk, June 4, 1994 by CNB