EDITORIALS BY:
The Sun Herald, Biloxi, MS

NOTE: This web page was started in early March 1998 to acknowledge the support provided by the Biloxi, MS, Sun Herald for America's military retirees. In 1998 the military retirees had their backs to the wall. We needed help and we received help from The Sun Herald. At that time Floyd Sears wrote this introduction.

I am a military retiree. Along with many other military retirees, I am engaged in a struggle via letters, e-mail, and web pages, to regain the dignity and respect owed to the military retirees which is commensurate with their deeds and accomplishments. I am also engaged in the struggle to regain the medical care benefits promised to me and other military retirees as a result of spending 20 or more years in the military and retiring.

Often I think about quitting the struggle. Often I think that nobody really cares about the military retiree and the roll they have played to gain and maintain the freedom we all enjoy. Then, when I'm right on the verge of giving up, someone does something that causes me to continue. In this case it is "The Sun Herald" a Mississippi Gulf Coast newspaper. Their editorials have picked me up by the nape of my neck, gave me a sharp boot to my backside, made me realize that I am not alone in my struggle, and has provided me with the encouragement to continue.

We, the military retirees along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, are very proud to have a newspaper and an editorial staff in our community that is willing to stand up and be counted as Americans supporting the military, the military retirees, and the military veterans.

Click here to access The Sun Herald Online.
Click here to thank The Sun Herald (via e-mail) for their support.

EDITORIAL BY:
The Sun Herald
A Knight Ridder Newspaper Serving the Mississippi Gulf Coast since 1884

Roland Weeks Jr., President and Publisher
Michael Tonos, Executive Editor
B. Marie Harris, Editorial Director
Tony Biffle, Associate Editor
Dorthy Wilson, Managing Editor
1 March 1998

A Nation Is Only As Good As Its Word

The matter of medical care for retired veterans has been much debated in recent years, and courts have been called upon to determine the governments liability. Regardless of court rulings, this is true: Countless thousands of military officers and non-coms have promised, in the name of the government they represented, lifetime medical care to those who served the number of years to earn this retirement benefit.

That promise may not appear in any law passed by congress, but it was indeed made, thousands of times, over and over again, in all branches of the service. And those promises were buttressed by the reality that for years and years and years, until only recently, the government kept that promise.

Only in the recent past has the government begun to tell veterans that space is no longer available. Heretofore, the service saw to it that there was sufficient space and there were sufficient health-care providers.

Squeezing veterans out of medical care by limiting space available and providers is a disgraceful tactic. It dishonors the men and women who performed their military service in full expectation that their own government would fulfill its part of the retirement bargain.

If there needs to be a law to force the government to do what it and its representatives promised so many times to do, let that law be written and adopted.

Not even balancing the budget, which this newspaper has so often advocated, is important enough to justify taking away the medical care our military men and women have earned through their service to this country.

It's the right thing to do. It is the only right thing to do.

EDITORIAL BY:
The Sun Herald
A Knight Ridder Newspaper Serving the Mississippi Gulf Coast since 1884

Roland Weeks Jr., President and Publisher
Michael Tonos, Executive Editor
B. Marie Harris, Editorial Director
Tony Biffle, Associate Editor
Dorthy Wilson, Managing Editor
4 August 1998

'Saving Private Ryan' may help save others

Americans will sit in dark movie theaters this summer watching Steven Spielberg shed light on World War II. Or is it war in general that "Saving Private Ryan" illuminates?

It ought to be. Twenty-five years after the end of the draft, fewer and fewer Americans are familiar with just the drudgery, much less the dread, of soldiering.

Of course, it doesn't require a draft to link us to our past. There are still enough veterans around to do that. If they would. And if we would let them.

As Jon Meacham wrote in the July 13 issue of Newsweek, "For decades, many old soldiers, now in their 70s and 80s, were reluctant to discuss the war even with their own families. But in the twilight of their lives, their numbers dwindling, they are finally speaking up."

But are they? And if so, who's listening?

As Richard Schickel put it in the July 27 issue of Time, "faltering old men" are preserving "the memory of those distant days" for "a generation dismayingly heedless of history."

In a column on the opposite page, Kendall Wingrove suggests several ways veterans can help others take heed of history. To emphasize the importance of doing that, Wingrove quotes the first lady of World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt: "We have to remember that in the future we will want to keep before our children what this war was really like. It is so easy to forget; and then, for the younger generation, the heroism and the glamour remain, while the dirt, the hardships, the horror of death and the sorrow fade somewhat from their consciousness."

There was so much hardship and horror and sorrow.

It took more than 2 million Allied soldiers - and more than 135,500 American lives - to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis. On June 6, 1944, the first 170,000 of those Allied troops went ashore on D-Day. Of those American, British and Canadian comrades in arms, more than 10,500 became casualties - either killed, wounded or reported missing in action.

While the overall casualty rate was miraculously light, in some units it exceeded 90 percent and could hardly have been deadlier.

That deadliness consumes the first half-hour of Spielberg's 2 hour and 40 minute film.

"It's really gross," said moviegoer Katie Bosler, 16, of Farmington, Mich.

That's because, noted D-Day veteran Edward Dyar, 72, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., "War is a very ugly thing, you know, and because it is such an ugly thing, some people won't handle it too well."

Spielberg himself says he walked the line between depicting "the barely tolerable and the intolerable."

Why then leave it to a Hollywood director - even one of Spielberg's talent - to link us to our past?

Because not enough Edward Dyars have shared their life-and-death experiences with enough Katie Boslers.

No plaque will ever convey the horrors of war There is considerable activity on the Coast just now to preserve the contributions of World War II veterans. Those commemorative efforts are laudable.

But no flagpole or plaque can tell a child what it was like. That takes a veteran willing to talk and someone else willing to sit in a quiet room or walk beside a deserted beach and listen.

It is best if they are related by blood. It is sufficient that they merely respect what each other has - one, the experience; the other, the desire to share in it.

One angry Marine who served in Vietnam said after seeing "Saving Private Ryan" that "the ones who didn't go" to Vietnam ought to be forced to see the movie "to see what they put somebody else through."

Such bitterness must be a terrible burden.

How much better it would be for non-veterans to see the movie and listen to veterans, not to learn what somebody else went through, but to appreciate what nobody else should ever have to go through again.

The editorials above represent the views of The Sun Herald editorial board: President-Publisher Roland Weeks Jr., Executive Editor Michael Tonos, Editorial Director Marie Harris, Associate Editor Tony Biffle and Managing Editor Dorothy Wilson.

EDITORIAL BY:
The Sun Herald
A Knight Ridder Newspaper Serving the Mississippi Gulf Coast since 1884

Roland Weeks Jr., President and Publisher
Michael Tonos, Executive Editor
B. Marie Harris, Editorial Director
Tony Biffle, Associate Editor
Dorthy Wilson, Managing Editor
24 May 2000

In his heart, Lott must know veterans are right

The credo of the Department of Veterans Affairs is taken from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address: "To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan."

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., many years ago shifted his political allegiance to the party of Lincoln and, in so doing, bound himself to the promises that that president made and that, war after war since the Civil War, this nation has tried to keep.

Until recently.

For some time now those "who shall have borne the battle" have felt betrayed by the nation to which they pledged to bear true faith and allegiance.

The nature of this betrayal is the denial of the full medical benefits and coverage veterans were promised in exchange for donning a uniform and placing themselves in harm's way for their country.

To save money, Congress has stripped veterans of the unencumbered access to medical care that was made available to previous generations of veterans and that - sanctioned by Congress or not - veterans were continually promised by military recruiters and re-enlistment personnel.

Whatever justification might have existed in the past for this fiscal conservatism is washed away by the record amounts of revenue now flowing into the national treasury.

Yet, out of an avowed sense of fiscal responsibility, Lott has maintained that the nation cannot afford to immediately and entirely return to veterans the medical treatment afforded them previously.

We respectfully suggest to the senator that the nation cannot afford not to.

We would ask the highest ranking Mississippian in the national government to look into the nation's heart rather than its wallet when he considers what is at stake here.

This is a matter of honor. And of duty.

It is a matter of remembering, as the senator so often says he does, the lessons taught at home and at church and at school - and implementing them.

We would not try to tug on the senator's heartstrings if this were a debate over building another warship in Pascagoula or another bridge over the Back Bay of Biloxi.

But the senator must be mindful that for a tragically diminishing number of Americans, this is a matter of, if not life and death, then certainly the quality of life until death.

And the matter falls more heavily upon Lott's shoulders than on any other senator. For as majority leader, he sets the Senate's agenda as does no other member.

Surely if he listens to his heart, Lott will place this matter quickly and squarely before the Senate where, we must believe, it will be dealt with honorably.

The web page name - "The Retired Military Advocate" - copyrighted 17 Sept. 1997
Click here to e-mail: fsears@bellsouth.net
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