We gather together today to remember – and to revere – those who gave their lives defending America.  To them, and to those who stood with them and by them, we owe our freedom.

Memorial Day is a day to remember that freedom is not free.  The long rows of graves here in the countryside near Anzio, so far from our homeland, like so many other graves around the world, like the wounds and scars so many have suffered, are reminders that others bore heavy burdens and paid painful prices to preserve our freedom.

Memorial Day is a day to remember death.  To remember pain.  To remember suffering.  To remember the agony of war.  To hope and pray that Plato was wrong when he said that only the dead have seen the end of war.  And to remember that there are things so precious as to be worth fighting and dying for.

Memorial Day is a day to think of peace.  We yearn for peace, but yearning is not enough.  Peace, like freedom, has a price.  The same price – courage.  The courage to pay the price and bear the burden of keeping America strong enough to prevail against the evil that confronts us.  There is no better way we can honor those who gave us freedom and those who fought to keep us free than to insure that our heritage of freedom shall not perish.

It is fashionable today in some narrow and often influential circles to search for excuses to ridicule those who serve in our military, to belittle their efforts to defend us against our adversaries, to portray our own country as the impediment to a better world, and to profess belief in the absurd notion that there is a moral equivalency between us who are the defenders of freedom and those who have already enslaved millions and still seek to enslave us.  Fashionable – but foolish.  Dangerously foolish.

There are those – some well intentioned, some not, some merely naive, some bent on appeasement – who foolishly, often arrogantly, claim a monopoly on the commitment to achieving peace.  Disparaging defense, scorning the soldier, quick to criticize America, and just as quick to apologize for our adversaries, they arrogate to themselves the label "peace activists."  They are wrong.

"The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace," said general Douglas MacArthur, "for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war."  Think about that the next time you see some of these misguided self-proclaimed activists who cannot bear the thought of action in defense of freedom ridiculing the military.  Remember that there are no finer activists for peace anywhere in the world than the men and women who serve in the military forces of the United States of America.  Nor any more effective.

Memorial Day is a day to remember that we remain the land of the free only because we have been the home of the brave.

As we gaze across the long rows of graves and the hundreds of small American flags blowing gently in the breeze, we think of the land we love and the freedom we cherish.  And we remember those who preserved and protected America and freedom.

If those Americans who stood guard and kept us free at Anzio and all the other battlefields throughout our history could ask a question of us, it might well be that great question that ends our national anthem: "Does that star-spangled banner still wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"