I bought two books to read for a weekend trip coming up. I thought I would start with Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives, the “lighter” one.
This book by Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Sheeler should be required reading by every elected federal government official (executive and legislative branches). And you should read it too.
As President Reagan reminded us in the speech he gave at Pointe-du-Hoc, on the celebration of the D-Day invasion, “there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.” While Final Salute does not debate the moral merits of the war (I have only read 1/3 of it so far, but this is probably true of the entire book), as one who believes the Iraq war is immoral, I am consumed by the overwhelming sense of loss captured in this book. And this is why our elected officials should be forced to read it.
As one president has noted (I thought it was Reagan, but it may have been Lincoln), young men who die in battle pay twice: once with the life that they give, and the other with the life they never had the chance to live.
Final Salute reminds us of both lives lost. It is not really a “light read”, but it is an important one.
