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https://pjmedia.com/video/5-most-inspiring-lines-from-president-trumps-memorial-day-speech-at-arlington-cemetery/

On Monday, President Donald Trump gave brief remarks at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who made the ultimate sacrifice. In a sign of true humility, he clapped perhaps more than he spoke, and his remarks extolled the fortitude and nobility of America’s fallen heroes.

Here are five of the most moving lines Trump delivered at Arlington on Memorial Day. The video follows below.
1. “A love more deep than most will ever know.”

Trump began his Memorial Day remarks extolling the love America’s fallen heroes showed for their country.

“Theirs was a love more deep and more pure than most will ever know,” he declared. “It was a love that willed them up mountains, through deserts, across oceans and into enemy camps, and unknown dangers. They marched into hell so that America could know the blessings of peace. They died so that freedom could live.”
2. “We cannot imagine…”

Trump directly addressed the families who lost loved ones in the service of American freedom.

“Most importantly we’re joined today by the families of American heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice,” the president said. “We cannot imagine the depth of emotion that this day brings each year: the grief renewed, the memories relived, those last beautiful moments together cherished and always remembered. And you also feel that incredible pride, a pride shared by one really and truly grateful nation.”

“To every parent who weeps for a child, to every child who mourns for a parent, and to every husband or wife whose heart has been torn in two, today we ask God to comfort your pain, to ease your sorrow, and to wipe away your tears,” Trump said. “This is a very special day, and today our whole country thanks you, embraces you, and pledges to you we will never forget our heroes.”
3. Hope Stubenhofer.

During his remarks, President Trump addressed Hope Stubenhofer, whose father — U.S. Army Captain Mark Stubenhofer — died while fighting in Iraq in December 2004, mere months after her birth.

“Although she never got the chance to meet her great father, she can feel his love wrapped around her every single day,” the president said. “And when Patty [Mark’s widow] puts her children to bed and kisses them goodnight, she can see Mark’s legacy beaming back at her through their bright and glowing eyes.”
4. Christian Jacobs.

President Trump then addressed 7-year-old Christian Jacobs, whose father — Marine Sergeant Christopher Jacobs — died in a training accident in 2011 when Christian was only 8 months old.

Trump movingly told the story of Christian visiting the White House in a Marine Corps uniform. “He wanted to look good, he told me, as a tribute to his father,” the president recalled.

“Christian, I want you to know that even though your father has left this world, he’s left it for the next, but he’s not gone. He’ll never be gone,” the president declared. “Your dad’s love, courage, and strength live in you, Christian. And as you grow bigger and stronger just like him, so too, does your father’s incredible legacy.”
5. Why we remember America’s heroes.

The president concluded his speech with another moving declaration. Of the fallen, he declared, “They fought and bled and died so that America would remain forever safe and strong and free. Each of the markers on that field, each of the names engraved in stone, teach us what it means to be loyal, and faithful and proud and brave and righteous and true.”

“That is why we always will remember, because here on this soil, on these grounds, beneath those fields, lies the true source of American greatness, of American glory, and of American freedom,” Trump said. “As long as we are blessed with patriots such as these, we shall remain forever one people, one family, and one nation under God.”

In the current time of tragic polarization, these Memorial Day remarks at Arlington National Cemetery are more important than ever. Watch Trump’s tribute to America’s fallen heroes below.

General Douglas MacArthur said of the American soldiers: “However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.”

In his farewell speech to West Point on May 12, 1962 he gives an eloquent tribute to those who choose to serve and defend America:

“Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?

Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.

His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy’s breast.

But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.

In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.

From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory’s eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.

I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they saw the way and the light.

And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, against the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of the relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation of those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropic disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.

Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory – always victory, always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of Duty, Honor, Country.”

On the eve of Memorial Day, here’s a piece we get a lot of requests for. It was first written for The Chicago Sun-Times and other papers in 2004, and is anthologized in my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn. A lot of the controversies mentioned below – Abu Ghraib, etc – are forgotten, and others – Guantanamo Bay – became mysteriously less controversial after, oh, late January 2009. Time passes, and moss and lichen creep across ancient grave stones. But the men beneath them are forever young:

Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays “Anchors Aweigh,” “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America” and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens’ “Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)” (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town’s selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War’s great poetry. There’s a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.

Before the First World War, it was called Decoration Day – a day for going to the cemetery and “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members; others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.

I wish we still did that. Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862. 1843-1864.