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Tuesday, 05/29/2018 6:27:17 PM

Tuesday, May 29, 2018 6:27:17 PM

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A Hero’s Plea on Memorial Day
By Carol Giacomo
Ms. Giacomo is a member of the editorial board.

May 29, 2018

Paul Bucha is about as safe and predictable a Memorial Day speaker as you could book in largely white, largely rich Greenwich, Conn.

Distinguished gray-haired white man in a suit and tie. Retired Army captain. Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War with as harrowing and inspiring a story of wartime bravery and leadership as anyone has ever heard.

Only his speech wasn’t safe. It wasn’t predictable. It was the kind of message that needs to be heard more in these deeply fractured United States.

This particular ceremony is held annually at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, with its elite membership and sweeping vista of Long Island Sound. It features a flag-raising, the national anthem, a wreath-laying on the water, bagpipes and taps.

The audience is overwhelmingly older and white with many men in khakis and navy blue jackets plus a smattering of the kind of middle-class residents — police officers and firemen and others — that I and my siblings grew up with. My family has lived in Greenwich for a century. And this ceremony is a must-stop for politicians, including Linda McMahon, who heads President Trump’s Small Business Administration, and Democrats like Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Jim Himes, all of whom are Greenwich residents.

I was at the ceremony with my two sisters because of our deceased father, Casper Giacomo, an Army captain who received the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart in World War II, and because my brother-in-law, Jimmy McMurray, a Marine who participates faithfully in local veterans activities, was part of the Memorial Day honor guard.

The occasion was what you would expect until Mr. Bucha took the lectern.

Without notes and with a poignancy that brought some of his listeners to tears, he made a case for those who have demanded an end to police brutality and racial inequity, without directly mentioning those athletes who have taken a knee during the national anthem or groups like Black Lives Matter. His words came days after the N.F.L. voted to fine teams whose players don’t stand for the national anthem while they are on the field.

Mr. Bucha compared the protests to those in the 1960s and 1970s when idealistic young people were vilified for opposing the Vietnam War while he and his men were in combat. “We were reminded that’s what we fought for, the right of each and every American to speak their mind,” he told us. The anthem controversy, which is “often misportrayed,” he said, reflects a similar righteous outrage against wrongs that the protesters feel need to be corrected.

Mr. Bucha recalled that the men he led in combat — many of whose names are on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington — were largely from river cities, country towns, “black, yellow, red, white,” and considered “losers and dangerous.” Many were so poor that they joined the military because they had no other choice. Yet they served in Delta Company, Third Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, one of the most decorated companies in the war.

Faced with the current controversy, “I was reminded of who my men were and where they might stand or kneel today,” said the former battalion commander, a graduate of West Point as well as the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

“And I started thinking maybe that my role is to remind all of us that we don’t need this argument,” he said. “We need to listen to the kids like my men who are from the poorer sections of our society. People we have left behind.”

“Why? The men and women who wear the uniform today come from those communities,” he added. “The vast majority joined the military because there were no jobs at home and when they joined they didn’t know where they were going. If you said Afghanistan, they couldn’t find it on a map.”

This hero suggested that thanking troops for their service is an insufficient, perfunctory gesture if you’re not concerned with their lives at home.

After Vietnam, he said, the country eventually “came together and we came together stronger than when we started because we opened our hearts to the concerns of others.”

“How hard is it to tell football players who use their platforms to ‘Stand up, let’s hold hands and let’s stop the violence that you so rightly pointed out to each of us and let’s come back and maybe even say thank you. You brought it to our attention and now it’s our job to solve that problem.’”

Mr. Bucha was a powerful apostle for a message many Americans don’t want to hear. He earned a standing ovation on Memorial Day. The question is whether he changed any minds.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/opinion/memorial-day-paul-bucha-speech.html?

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