The new year brings 2,016 reasons to remember that freedom is neither free nor everlasting, but inked in the blood of valiant men and women — like American soldiers Adrianna Vorderbruggen, 36; Michael Cinco, 28; Peter Taub, 30; Chester McBride, 30; Louis Bonacasa, 31; and Joseph Lemm, 45 — who died in Afghanistan on Christmas week to preserve the ideal responsible for all our comforts and joys.
The battlefield bravehearts were among the 9,800 American troops left in terror’s lair to advise, train, and assist Afghan security forces, before a suicide bomber claimed their lives in yet another chilling confirmation of our sworn enemies’ resolution to kill us — wherever, however. Their supreme sacrifice is echoed by the nearly 7,000 U.S. service members killed in the foggy war on terror, likely knowing they mattered less to Uncle Sam than the Islamo-refugees and their cowardly ranks of able-bodied men and women who have left the slog of their national defense to the “infidels.”
Our living veterans return home desolate, limbless shells of their former selves. According to the Wounded Warrior Project:
• 52,386 are wounded
• 320,000 have brain injuries
• 400,000 suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders
Uncle Sam is cutting their benefits while leaving intact taxpayer-funded entitlement programs for illegals and other moochers — both added blows to soldiers’ pain and suffering.
Any American demise in the line of duty is a national catastrophe, and Joseph Lemm’s death hits the Big Apple at its core, because the husband and father of two school-age children was a New York Police Department detective doing double duty as a technical sergeant in the National Guard. In heartsick irony, he surrendered his life preserving the rights of the civilians who abuse those hard-won freedoms to castigate the entire police force nationwide — our first line of defense when terror strikes the homeland.
Lemm and his fellow heroes join the distinguished legions of ordinary men and women who became extraordinary defenders of American values when duty called, and whose bodies are buried in nearly every graveyard in the nation.
Their memories must be exalted — 2,016 times and more — for giving their final breaths to the enemy so that America can live on.
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