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This D-Day, Reflect On Personal Responsibility

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: It is not because they felt no fear that those inspirational leaders are remembered as heroes. They were almost all scared to death. No, they're remembered as heroes because they felt the full measure of fear about the near-impossible feats they were about to undertake, and they knew the long odds associated with the incredible personal risks they were about to take... but they did it anyway....

This D-Day, Reflect On Personal Responsibility

Do You Have The Courage To Win Your Own Battle? Sixty-seven years ago today, one of history's most massive demonstrations of personal responsibility and inspirational leadership took place. Because National Socialism (Naziism) had proceeded to the bloody despotism that is always the natural conclusion of such statism, someone had to storm the Normandy beaches and drop from the sky behind enemy lines to begin the removal from the planet of Adolph Hitler.

Hundreds of brave souls from many allied countries did just that on June 6, 1944. They didn't do it because they wanted to, or because it was convenient, or even because they'd been ordered to do it. They did it because they knew it had to be done, and that the cause was just.

It is not because they felt no fear that those inspirational leaders are remembered as heroes. They were almost all scared to death. No, they're remembered as heroes because they felt the full measure of fear about the near-impossible feats they were about to undertake, and they knew the long odds associated with the incredible personal risks they were about to take... but they did it anyway.

The U.S. Army Rangers scaled those cliffs at Pointe du Hoc and took out those German guns that were firing down on the beaches. Some lived to tell about it, to come home and start businesses and raise families and live lives as close to "normal" as they could manage... but many didn't, and none could ever forget those harrowing hours.

The airborne troops, such as the forefathers of my own unit (the 82nd Airborne Division), jumped out of burning planes or rode gliders to uncertain landings and took towns and bridges to aid the advance, all on faith, all on the assumption that their colleagues would actually make it onto the beach despite Hitler's formidable defenses. Some of the paratroopers lived through that, and they too came home to try to find a little piece of the American Dream they'd helped make possible. But many didn't live, and the others never shook the memories that were like some sort of impossible horror movie.

D-Day was the beginning of the end for the "Axis of Evil" of that day. Thousands of miles east, in the Pacific Ocean, the end of the end finally came a little more than a year later - in no small part because of what the sailors of the USS Indianapolis accomplished before their ship was sunk by the Japanese. Unbeknownst to most of those sailors, their ship had just delivered the atomic weapons that would bring the war to a conclusion a few days later - but when the Indy was torpedoed, the few survivors had to endure days on end just bobbing along in the frigid water. Many were drowned, some died of their injujries, and some were even eaten by sharks... but some survived to tell about it. They came home. They worked their jobs or ran their shops, they got to the table for supper, they helped their kids with their homework. But they never forgot the agony of the war, and the unbelievable hardships they endured for freedom's sake.

I guess that's the point of the commemoration of D-Day, now two-thirds of a century later.

They could never forget it. They could never forget D-Day, and what they had to do despite their palpable fear, and what it meant for them to do it.

And neither should we.

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Article Tags: entrepreneurship, health wealth and happiness, inspirational leadership, personal responsibility



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