Maybe some of you folks have already seen this. A friend sent this to me today, and I had not seen it before. I grew up in the years just after WWII, my Dad fought in it and I found it deeply touching – so keep the tissues box handy . . .
Image: Aerial View of WWII Memorial, Washington D.C. (Photo by Rick Latoff/American Battle Monuments Commission)
The elderly parking lot attendant wasn’t in a good mood!Neither was Sam Bierstock. It was around 1 a.m., and Bierstock, a Delray Beach, Fla. , eye doctor, business consultant, corporate speaker and musician, was bone tired after appearing at an event.
He pulled up in his car, and the parking attendant began to speak. “I took two bullets for this country and look what I’m doing,” he said bitterly.
At first, Bierstock didn’t know what to say to the World War II veteran. But he rolled down his window and told the man, “Really, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you.”
Then the old soldier began to cry.
“That really got to me,” Bierstock says.
Cut to today.
Bierstock, 58, and John Melnick, 54, of Pompano Beach – a member of Bierstock’s band, Dr. Sam and the Managed Care Band – have written a song inspired by that old soldier in the airport parking lot. The mournful “Before You Go” does more than salute those who fought in WWII. It encourages people to go out of their way to thank the aging warriors before they die.
“If we had lost that particular war, our whole way of life would have been shot,” says Bierstock, who plays harmonica. “The WW II soldiers are now dying at the rate of about 2,000 every day. I thought we needed to thank them.”
The song is striking a chord. Within four days of Bierstock placing it on the Web http://www.beforeyougo.us/ , the song and accompanying photo essay have bounced around nine countries, producing tears and heartfelt thanks from veterans, their sons and daughters and grandchildren.
“It made me cry,” wrote one veteran’s son. Another sent an e-mail saying that only after his father consumed several glasses of wine would he discuss “the unspeakable horrors” he and other soldiers had witnessed in places such as Anzio, Iwo Jima, Bataan and Omaha Beach. “I can never thank them enough,” the son wrote. “Thank you for thinking about them.”
Bierstock and Melnick thought about shipping it off to a professional singer, maybe a Lee Greenwood type, but because time was running out for so many veterans, they decided it was best to release it quickly, for free, on the Web. They’ve sent the song to Sen. John McCain and others in Washington. Already they have been invited to perform it in Houston for a Veterans Day tribute – this after just a few days on the Web. They hope every veteran in America gets a chance to hear it.
GOD BLESS every veteran…and thank you !
CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO HEAR THE SONG AND SEE THE PICTURES:
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America if you didn’t believe us in the past, this should do nothing but reinforce how we are saying that the enemy is trying to get to you all at home to go south and demand us to come home before the job is done and that the media is soooo off mark. This just proves we are making huge gains here. Why? Because the real blind sheep, the big time news agencies, bought the trick, line and sinker from the terrorists. They fell for the oldest trick in the book, taking news tips from the enemy and paying them big cash to allow camera men to tag along with them. Yea great idea because a camera might look like an RPG to a Marine far enough away. It’s a clever technique that the US invented. Counter psyops is one way to buy out ‘reliable’ sources to submit stories to the press. This is now proof of how desperate the big time news agencies are for bad gauge on the US campaign in Iraq. They have no news so they pay for whatever may come down the line. Lowering their contacts and standards they knowingly purchase news reports and film events from the enemy.