U.S. Retirees Association Veterans Day Celebration (11/11/07)
U.S. Retirees Association Veterans Day Celebration
Remarks by Deputy Chief of Mission
American College of Greece
November 11, 2007
Good morning. Thank you for coming out today.
It is a duty that we share, to remember those who have gone before us, the sacrifices that they made, and to remember and honor those who are still with us, who can bear a living testimony not only to the horrors of war but to the glory and determination that men and women are capable of showing in the most difficult of circumstances. This is our duty.
It is one of the duties that I value greatly. There are some other things that I have to do in my job that, quite seriously, I would just as soon not have to do. This is not in that category at all. This is a moment of genuine reflection, of genuine opportunity both to remember and to celebrate, and I want to thank very much the Military Retirees Association for doing this every year and the American College of Greece for hosting it once again this year.
For the United States, Veterans Day is even broader than the remembrance of those who died in World War I, who served their countries in a great alliance. We remember on this day not only the veterans of that war but of all the wars before and since, and we honor also those who have served their country with honor in peacetime. The memories of other wars can fade, and a generation today knows much less about the battles that were fought in the First World War, in the Second World War, in Korea, and in Vietnam than they know about today’s celebrities or about the latest computer. We still have the duty, however, to set aside not only Monday’s special remembrance but to seek to do more to teach this generation and the next one about obligations they may have to take up, about duties that they have as citizens, whether in Greece or in the United States or in any of the other freedom-loving countries in the world. That is why we set aside this day, and it is also why we go beyond this day and seek to bring in through our hearts and into our minds and into our schools, through our public celebrations, a reminder of real lessons of history, the good and the bad, the most difficult and the most heroic, and to give some of those values to the young men and women of today.
When I was at this spot two years ago, fairly newly arrived in Athens, I spoke some of the same words about the need to educate and pass on to another generation what we know about war and what we know about duty, and so I hope you will indulge me today because I realize that I could do more, at least for myself and my family, to help that education, to help pass that memory. I brought with me today my son, Stefan, both because I wanted him to meet you and to hear first-hand about the duty of veterans and how they have fulfilled it, but also to say something personal.
My father-in-law, my wife’s father, Radislav Trklja, was a Serb and a Yugoslav. In 1941, when he was 19 years old, the Nazi army invaded Yugoslavia, and he went first as a courier and ran the secret printing press for the Yugoslav resistance in his parents’ home. He was the oldest of eight children and already responsible for providing for the other children, and after only a few months, he turned from this activity to being a partisan, or an αντάρτης as we would say here, and went to war against the Nazis in Kosovo, in Bosnia, and in Serbia. He was wounded once and for the rest of his life walked with a severe limp. At the very end of the war, he contracted typhus and was left for dead in the hospital because they had no drugs to treat him, and yet he survived. He did things and saw things that would be familiar to any of you that lived through a war here: a different place, but not a terribly different place and not a terribly different experience from what Greece went through in those same years. And eventually many years after the war, he was able to start his own family.
He didn’t live long enough to see his grandchildren, and that’s one of the great sorrows of my own life because I have not known a better man. If we had had more people like Stefan’s grandfather, I think all the tragedies we have seen in the old Yugoslavia in the last twenty years would have been avoided. And I just want to thank you, and Greece, that you gave me the opportunity to celebrate, for just a moment, a veteran of another country, of a war that you know, and to share that with my son.
I understand that Ron will talk later about another Greek American, Yanni Yennaris, and the role that he played here, working with the Resistance to the Nazi forces, and I’m very sorry that he’s not here this morning. I had a chance again to look through his book this weekend, and it is a dramatic story of what the United States and Greek American soldiers in particular were able to do, working with the greatest and the freest men in existence, the Greek resistance, and the soldiers who fought against the interim occupation. It is a story that I think is not widely known in Greece. In part, as you know, the United States has a lot of image problems in Greece, some of them we bring on ourselves. In this case, the dramatic story of what the United States Special Forces were able to accomplish, working with their Greek comrades, was kept largely classified as an official state secret for thirty years after the war at a time when those who were still living would have been happy to hear about it, to talk about it, and to learn about it. It could have become part of the curriculum, the history that people rely upon as they write about the tragic times that Greek went through in the 1940s to have a full record of the kind of American friendship that we showed at that time and the successes we had together. It might have made a difference today for how we are perceived. My point is only that it is not too late.
I think, in general, Greece does a better job of remembering its military history, its heroes, the positive and the negative, than we do in the United States, in terms of the ceremonies that we give to our townspeople, that we give in our schools. But we all could do better, and I want to again thank the Military Retirees Association for all their efforts to collect everyone’s memories, everyone’s oral histories, not only of the Second World War, but of everything our two militaries have done together since to make the record accurate and complete and to share with our fellow citizens and our kids.
If you’ve heard me give a speech before, then you’ve certainly heard me say that the relationship between the U.S. military and the Greek military is strong and, in fact, has been the strongest sustained piece of our bilateral relationship through the years, even at times when we may have had problems in a lot of other areas. It’s true today, and it’s not true because of magic or just history or tradition, but because people who share the same values as our predecessors in the military, in both militaries, of determination, of duty, and of sacrifice fulfill that role as well in peacetime.
This is our chance today to salute those who have fallen, to salute those who have fought, and to honor all those who have served their country in wartime and in peace. It is a point of pride, and must remain so, that we stand together with our citizens in uniform.
So, hail to our veterans, of Greece and of the United States. Keep them in your memory, and thank you for this opportunity once again.