Remember those missing in action

As a veteran and as commander of the St. Charles VFW Post, nothing strikes at the very fiber of your being as does the thought of being injured, killed or captured during combat and being summarily forgotten by your country.

We all went into combat situations thinking it was a possibility but praying that we would make it out and return home to our communities and our families. For some of us that was not the case.

Sept. 21 is POW/MIA Recognition Day. It is a time when, we as a nation, are specifically called to remember those brave men and women who went before us and for some reason have never been accounted for.

From World War II alone there are some 74,000 service members who were classified as missing following that war. The Korean War gave us another 8,176 unaccounted for, the Cold War saw us lose 125, during the Vietnam War we sacrificed another 2,000 plus heroes to be forgotten by history and in the 1991 Gulf War we still have one missing man.

What if these 82,000 missing service members were your brother, your husband or your son? Would you be OK with anything less than a full accounting of the events that took them from us?

When service members die in combat that is difficult enough. But when a man or woman goes off to defend our freedom and in doing that is captured by a brutal sadistic enemy or is never accounted for other than the government saying they found a crash site that is the epitome of being isolated, forgotten and sacrificed to convenience.

This Sept. 21 I ask that we as a community and as families remember those that are missing. We in the VFW have in all of our posts a POW/MIA flag on the wall near the service flags of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. It is near those flags but separated by a few feet to visually remind us of our missing and captured comrades and also to show that inside we are with them but the separation tells us we are all not yet home.

This POW/MIA Recognition Day lets remember our brothers and sisters, go to your house of worship and say a prayer for their safe return and for their pain to be eased, write a letter to our congressman demanding a full accounting and talk to your children about these missing heroes and why we should never forget them.

We as a country owe them much more than we have given them. By their sacrifice they have given us the right to forget them and unfortunately, we as a society, have accepted that.

Joe Creedon

Commander

St Charles VFW

Memorial Post 5036