The Warriors Path - Part 1: Freedom Isn't Free

Well, this is that week, friends, that run-up week to summer vacations that we talked about last week. Last week was fixing to get ready. Here we are. And off we go, big season for folks traveling and doing all kinds of things. But I want to focus these next two weeks on a very special combination of things. One is this is Memorial Day Week. And next week is the 78th anniversary of the D-Day landings during World War II in Normandy. I've known him for almost 30 years and we've traveled to a variety of places, including across the world. And I'm honored to have him on board with us today and I'll introduce him to you in just a couple of moments. But Memorial Day, historically, has been that time in which we honor those service members, men and women who have fallen in the line of duty. As the language is used oftentimes at ceremonies in whether it's a national military, ceremony or others across the country, these are folks who have given the last full measure of devotion. It's very interesting some years ago in Washington, D.C. I asked several leaders different weeks, what was a key element, perhaps the key element in true leadership, and all three of them said sacrifice. They weren't in the same room or the same space, this is different times. There's something about the sacrifice of citizens of any nation to maintain freedom that is profound. And in title, these two weeks, freedom isn't free. Whether a person was a citizen soldier, they were drafted or volunteered to go into the army during time of great stress or war, or whether they were professional soldiers, whether they were in the supply chain or planning or logistics or maintenance or clerical stuff or training or actual front line in the trenches, folks or in the skies or on the seas. It's a word that comes to mind when I think about them. And the word for me is warrior. A warrior by definition is someone who beyond all obstacles will persevere in the end. Some years ago Ruth and I were researching ancestry. It was before you spit in a tube and sent it off for ancestry.com or 23 in me. We were back at a library. I think it was in a Rowan oak Virginia down on the West Virginia line or close to the West Virginia line. And we were looking at old maps. And I'd been an AM, a great fan of Louis Lemore, the Western writer, because the good guy always wins in the end in those books and they're easy to read and their mysteries to be solved. But there's one book entitled The Warrior's Path, which is about characters back in the 1700s. And we were looking at these old maps. Some of them may have even been on sort of parchment or vellum. And I looked and there was a line that said The Warrior's Path. And if you go online and check this out, there are numbers of places in the East particularly that were designated back in the 1700s as The Warrior's Paths. They were game trails, followed by Native Americans who were on the hunt, or oftentimes later on the way to battle. There's a famous Warriors Path that came out of Philadelphia, cross Pennsylvania, down the lower edge of the Alleghenies into the Shenandoah, down into the Great Smokies, that later became the Great Wagon Road. It was a track on which people, when it was enlarged, brought wagons to go and settle out in the Western lands as they came down through there and out the Cumberland Gap in out West. But when I think about this nation in particular, and I'm talking about the United States of America now, when I think about this nation, this land, and I think of all of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have sacrificed their lives so that I can do this, I can talk to you in cyberspace and say almost anything I want that's not treasonous, I suppose. I think that's a profound thing. Just for fun, I happen to look at, so what is the United States of America these days in terms of land or entities? Well, there are 50 states, we know that. There's a federal district called Washington, DC, the District of Columbia. There are five major unincorporated territories like Puerto Rico and American Samoa. Interestingly, not very interesting to me, is that there are 326 Native American reservations, those spaces into which those folks were pushed over the years, if you will, comprise about almost 2.5% of the landmass of the United States, more than 50 million acres, but it's not always the best acres, is it? But they have a kind of sovereignty within the United States, and they don't respond to the state leadership, they respond to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC. Then there's a scattering of outlying islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean that mostly are uninhabited, but they're considered under the governance of the United States of America. That's the land. The idea of the United States of America is captured in what we call the Constitution, in any person who's ever taken an oath to be in military service has raised his or her right hand and said, I take an oath, I swear, I pledge, I covenant to defend the Constitution of the United States, not an office, not an individual, not an entity like the Senate or the House, or even the Department of Defense, but an idea that's captured or a bunch of ideas that are captured in the Constitution of the United States. So these two weeks, we're going to focus on that, grateful for those who have sacrificed that we could be free, and the next piece, next week, I want to focus on the 78th anniversary of what we call D. Day, June 6th, 1944, when this one day in a world history, that change world history, happened, and along the course of the way, I want you to meet my friend. So let me introduce you to him now. I sat down with him just a couple of weeks back in his home in Virginia. Here we are. I'm sitting here downstairs in a wonderful home in McLean, Virginia, and I'm sitting with my friend, McKicklater. Again, still and forever. So I walk down into what I will call your man cave downstairs here, and as I come down the stairway, there are military pictures, as one would expect from a retired soldier, and there's a picture of Mother Teresa and signed from the prayer breakfast years ago, the bulk of this room is full of what I would call memorabilia and things that are Native American. And I'm thinking to myself, how does a fellow with a name like Kicklater end up connected to a Native American community? So I asked him to tell me about that. Well, when I was commanding Phil Artuributai in the 4th Division and 4th Carson, I had a communications chief whose name was Sam Wilson, and Sam Wilson was a Native American from Sesson and South Dakota, Dakota Suhtribe. And so Sam and I are respecting him as a soldier, but we both went to the same military chapel, he and his wife, and he had two children, I had three, and through the chapel we really got to know each other more than we did just in the unit. But we had a great relationship professionally, but we also had one spiritually. So Sam retired from the Army and went back to school on the GI Bill, and eventually he ended up back in his hometown, in his reservation, ministering to the people of that reservation. I think he had a calling to serve others as he had done in the military. And so Sam invited me, he came to visit me several times in Washington, in the Pentagon. He invited me in 1984 to come to a powwow in South Dakota, in Sesson and South Dakota. And I didn't know why, but I went to the powwow and at the ceremony, they inducted me as a member of the tribe in 1984. And so that began a relationship, which I'm very proud of, to be a member of the Sesson walked in Dakota's suit tribe in South Dakota. Mick and I went on to talk about the fact that it's really critical and important fact that in 2021, many of his family, his wife and kids and grandkids, went to Sesson and South Dakota for another ceremony. The first one had been in 1984. This was a much more elaborate ceremony that inducted, essentially, the whole family into the tribe to become part of that larger family, which is a very, very cool thing. So you're a Native American name, you're Dakota's suit name, one day Tanka, which means great eagle. Well, okay. I didn't know that I was sitting with great eagle. Well, I think I did, but that's terrific. The idea of warrior, the idea of warrior is that the heart of any of our serving people who serve in our military, in any capacity, pretty much, that's embedded, I think. But there's no place that is more, that it's more obvious than the week now in June where we commemorate Dede, June 6, 1944. Let me just pause here in real time and give you a better view of the person to whom I'm speaking, because I haven't given you any credentials, per se, at this juncture. If you were to go online and Google, Lieutenant General Claude M. Mick Kicklider, biography, you can read this, but let me just capture a bit of it. My friend Mick Kicklider was born and brought up in Georgia, went off to Mercer University in the 1950s, graduated ROTC, and went into the regular army. He was an officer in 1955, served two tours in Vietnam, and then began a series of service postings that took him from the first battalion, 21st Field Artillery, Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, all the way into a variety of roles, including what they called the J4 on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He went to Europe and led operations and entities there for years, and then became the commanding general in 1984 of the 25th Infantry Division, Scofield Barracks Hawaii. He served as the director of the Army Staff from 1987 to 1989, and his last assignment before retiring from active duty was commanding general, US Army, Western Command, and then commanding general, US Army Pacific, 1989 to 1991, and his rank at retirement was Lieutenant General. That means he was a three-star general. Those of you who have served in the military know that that's in a different plane than most of us. There are precious few of folks who serve at that level. And then this line, after retiring from the US Army, Mr. Kicklider was selected to lead our nation's effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of World War II from 1991 to 1995. Following that assignment regarding World War II, he became Deputy Undersecretary of the Army for International Affairs from 95 to 98, connecting the US Army with all the friendly armies in the world. He went on to serve as Assistant Secretary for Policy in Planning for the Department of Veterans Affairs and it up serving as Chief of Staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs from 99 to 2005. So when 9-11 happened, it took me nine days to find Mick Kicklider because he was in a different place running operations because it's veteran affairs that has all the stocks of supplies and hospital facilities and all of that in case of a nuclear attack. And then he was chosen by the Secretary of Defense in 2003 to be the Director of the Department of Defense's Iraq transition team that made the handoff, if you will. And in 2005, he was selected to establish the Iraq-Afghanistan Joint Transition Planning Group. In 2007, he went on to become the Inspector General for the entire Department of Defense. It just goes on and on. But I think a couple of things that if he were sitting with you that General Kicklider would enjoy talking about, I don't know if most, but way up there would be the fact that he had the privilege and served with distinction as being Chairman of the Board Habitat for Humanity International for several years. And the Board of Trustees at Mercy University is Alma Mater and more recently his special passion today is his service on the Board of Rescue Freedom International which has the mission of rescuing and restoring young women and children who've been sold into sex slavery. That group is now called Atlas Free. I say all that to say that there are some people who are a really big deal who act like they really are. General Kicklider is not one of those. In my opinion and many, many people would agree with me. The Kicklider is a big deal, but he is the most humble, big deal, the most humble three-star Army General that I've ever met. And I'm so grateful to sit with him. So let me rewind to that time period from 1991 through 95 of the commemoration, the honoring of all those folks who served in World War II and the places they served and we'll pick up the conversation there. It all began with I had a phone call from the Secretary of the Army. I was commanding the U.S. Army in the Pacific and I was getting ready to retire and I had a phone call from the Secretary of the Army, Mike Stone, who asked me to come by to talk to him. He didn't give a subject, but we had a commander's conference and he said I'd like you to stop by the office. And which I did and he said President Bush, Father Bush, Herbert Walker Bush and Dick Cheney, who was a Secretary of Defense, had been talking about commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II and the Army had been asked to be the executive agent for this role. And so Secretary Stone asked me if I would be willing to take that mission, and I said, well, you know, I spent a lot of years in the Pentagon. I don't mind taking the role alone, doing the planning, executing, and then sometime after that I might want to fade away before the end. And he said, well, I'll have to ask Secretary Cheney about that. And he asked him, called him on the phone while I was in the office and apparently the answer was no, we want somebody to stay the whole time. And so I said, well, thank you very much. And then the phone rang again and it was a Secretary Cheney calling saying, well, okay, if that's the only condition, they prefer not, but they would accept that. So I said, okay, I'll begin. But once you get into something like that, you really can't win. You get hooked to it. I had a lot of opportunities and offers to do other things. But once you get close to that generation, and you kind of, you feel a calling to help the nation, it was not the group, it was just a catalyst to help the nation think and honor the men and women and those who served on the home front, that not only, you know, because that generation only saved this nation, but with our allies, they literally saved the world. And so once you get involved in that, and we began to work with other nations that were our allies during the war, and we also work with the nations who are our adversaries, but at that time were our very strong allies. So they very much wanted to be involved in that as well. So these years, when you executed this plan and honored those who served and so forth, were 1991, the first event was December the 7th, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that event took place in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor, 50 years later, 50 years later, a lot of veterans there, really. And we even had a Japanese delegation there, really. So you were at Pearl and you were at that, that's where it began, and the final ceremony was the surrender of the war, VJ Day, Victory over Japan, at the end of the war. That also took place in Hawaii, and it was both were bookends and great events. So in between, and I want to get the D-Day, but in between what are some of the places you went and things you did? In between, we did all of the major events of the war, and the extent we could, we did the event at the site where the battles took place. But also we had events and we had commemorative partners, many, many states and communities had signed up to help do this. And so when we'd have a major event at some place around the world, there would be events in many hometowns all across America, honoring the veterans where they lived. I think so simultaneously, there would be many events going on. And some of the most memorable events were not the huge events, but those that were taking place in the hometowns where the veterans had left and come back. And many times they had never really been officially thanked by the hometowns, so those were very meaningful. As General Kicklider continued, he described the series of events that took place over a four or five year, almost a five year period, including commemorations at Iwo Jima in the South Pacific in Midway and a huge one, reenacting General MacArthur's return to the Philippines where about 70,000 people showed up for it. And that went on around the world in places even like India and other places. But let me frame now the run up to D-Day. D-Day had been planned for months, years, actually. And troops were pouring into the United Kingdom. It's estimated that over the course of the war, two million United States troops were in the United Kingdom and Great Britain. They were on hundreds of bases around the country. And at the time of D-Day, at least half a million, I think, were actually in country. When D-Day happened, it happened on the early morning of June 6, 1944, but it started the day before in General Kicklider will explain how that worked, as he speaks about the commemoration. Just as a point of reference, D-Day was the largest amphibious operation ever launched in world history, the largest naval armada, 505,300 plus ships in landing craft, 175,000 men from numbers of Allied nations. The US part of that was almost 60,000 young men. Over 2,000 would die on those beaches, thousands more wounded in those days. And the day before, and he'll speak to this a little bit in the commemoration, there was an air drop of paratroops from the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne. There are around 13,000 paratroopers dropped in during the night from over 1,200 aircraft. And then others came in in delighters during the day, it was this unbelievable thing. And he was part and parcel of planning, executing all of the logistics and the hundreds of people, perhaps thousands of people that had to be prepared for that D-Day commemoration, which actually for their purposes began not on the D-Day beaches, but in another country in Rome, Italy, which fell on June 4th, two days before D-Day on June 6th. And they wanted to commemorate that. And so General Kicklider explained the how and the why of that. One event that kind of got blown over is that Rome was liberated, Rome, Italy was liberated on the 4th of June, and it had been kind of forgotten. Because D-Day, it was such a big event, but if D-Day had not occurred then the fall of Rome in the beginning of the end of the fall of Italy, which followed after that. So we decided to commemorate the liberation of Rome, the 4th of June as well. So 48 hours before D-Day, Rome fell. So this is how it began to unfold. We had the first ceremony in Italy at the NatuNo U.S. military cemetery. And a lot of events took place around cemeteries because all we've ever asked in any country we've ever been in, the only ground we ever wanted was cemeteries to bear our war dead. General Kicklider went on to explain that after they had two ceremonies in Rome, one of which was attended by and hosted by President Bill Clinton. The president went on to England where the general met him for their first actual commemoration connected with D-Day itself, which was at Oxford, where a number of U.S. Airmen were buried. Most of the dead there were pilots, Air Force, and many names missing in action, bodies never discovered were pilots that were shot down. And so we thought that was in a very appropriate place as we began. We honor the air war that preceded the landings. Now the air war continued, but it proceeded and we lost a lot of casualties in the air battle over Europe. So the first event took place there. So that afternoon folks went down to the south of England to Portsmouth, Southampton places where there were scores and scores and scores of ships, and those were the sites from which D-Day was actually launched in terms of taking the military across, and the Queen was there, and then this happened. And then after that ceremony, 14 heads of state, I believe it was, got aboard the Britannica with Queen Elizabeth, and they sailed out towards Normandy, and they had lunch aboard the Britannica. We had brought a cargo ship, a World War II cargo ship, and come all the way from the west coast of the U.S. and was now located in England, and was going to make the crossing, and it was making the crossing. President and Mrs. Clinton got out of the off the Britannica in a small boat and came in and both got aboard the cargo ship, and they sailed aboard the cargo ship for a period of time. Was that what they historically called Liberty Ships? Yeah. Oh, okay. It was a Liberty ship, you know, and had such an impact not only in sustaining our forces, but also sustaining our allies and allowing them to stay in the war, but that was primarily the first of Marines. So that we honored those that served in that capacity. And then the President and the First Lady got off of that cargo ship, and they got aboard the aircraft carrier at George Washington, and so that's where they spent the night June the 5th. They spent the night aboard the aircraft carrier. At this point, let's pause. Let's be grateful this week for the sacrificial lives of those who have gone before us that allow us to do the things that we're going to be doing this week, and thinking the thoughts and being with our friends and loved ones and others. Freedom is a fascinating concept. It's the central motivating idea behind the United States of America. Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Toqueville, a French sociologist came to study prison reform and the United States ended up studying Americans. And he wrote a two volume work called Democracy in America, and one of his thesis, one of his main points, was that freedom was the core idea behind this nation, but it was even a bit more than that. Individual freedom was sort of the highest core value, as we say. When you read the Scriptures, when you read the Gospels, you have this wonderful thought in the middle of the Gospel of John the 8th chapter where Jesus of Nazareth says this to people who believed in him who had trusted him, if you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. It's interesting, sometimes in the nature of world affairs, it takes force of arms to set us free, but you've read stories and seen movies and heard people say, I might have been incarcerated. I might have been in this very difficult place, but in my heart and head, I was free. It's the ultimate kind of freedom, isn't it? But we are grateful for the physical freedoms that allows us the possibility to celebrate and commemorate the things we're doing right now. Next week when I come back, we will move on to what happened after that evening on the USS George Washington with President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, and with my friend Mick Kicklider. Again, it's so grateful for the fact that we have the capacity and the openness to be able to move and talk and do things that so many folks in the world today have not had the opportunity to do some of them for their entire lives, and we pray for them these days as well. With that being said, I will catch you next week for part two of this podcast series, Freedom isn't free. God bless, thanks for listening.