“FREEDOM IS NOT FREE: A SOLDIER’S PLEDGE:”
WE ARE AMERICANS - January 20, 1981 – Inaugural Address…

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of Man to a greater extent that has ever been done before.

Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth.

The price for this Freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

Those who say that we’re in a time when there are not Heroes, they just don’t know where to look… The sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetary, with its row upon row of simple white markers bearing Crosses or Stars-of-David. They add up to only a fraction of the price that has been paid for our Freedom. Each one of those markers is a Monument to the kind of Hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno, and halfway around the World on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred Rice paddies and Jungles of a place called Vietnam.

Under one such marker lies a Man named: Martin A. Treptow – who left from his small-town Barbershop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainow Division. There, on the Western Front, he was killed trying to carry a message between Battalions under heavy Artillery fire. We’re told that on his body was found a Diary. On the flyleaf under the heading “My Pledge” he had written these words:
“America must win this war [against any and all current and/or future enemies of Freedom]. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”

We must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the aresenals of the World is so formidable as the will and moral courage of FREE Men and Women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s World do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice Terrorism and prey upon their neighbors. As for the enemies of Freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that Peace is the highest aspiration of the American Peoples. We will negotiate for it, sacrafice for it; we will not surrender for it, now or ever!

more/related: Reagan Memorial Day address (click here)