Memorial Day tribute to our fallen: Honoring New Yorkers who gave their lives

Monday, May 25th 2009, 4:00 AM

Onward marches the Big Parade, forever into the somber beyond. A column of the young and the brave. Of the dutiful.

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

The youth replies, I can!

- Emerson

Pictured (below) this Memorial Day are 23 men from New York State whose line-of-duty deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were recorded since last Memorial Day.

Called by duty, gone to war.

Gone to flowers every one.

On this day, we pause to mourn them - and all those who did not come home from the battlefields.

The dead of this war.

The dead of the last war.

The dead of all wars past.

To honor their sacrifices. To humbly offer them our gratitude and our prayers. To assure their loved ones that we, the living, do not forget.

Cannot forget. Must not forget.

From the ashes of tyranny and sectarian strife they helped lift Iraq to a place of hope, finding its way slowly but certainly toward self-governance.

The focus of the fight moves to Afghanistan where they have battled and will battle and will overcome the horrors of terrorism.

But for the gallant likes of those pictured here, those who did not hesitate to answer duty's call, those horrors might well already have come again to American soil, as they did one lovely late summer morning nearly eight years ago.

It is a war that may go on beyond our own lifetimes, and for lifetimes yet to come. The measure of the success of our mission will be taken not today and not tomorrow.

It will be taken by the children.

Your children. Our children.

And their children.

And those whose loved ones are listed here today.

Loved ones who now march in the Big Parade.

Loved ones who now live on eternally, in the aching hearts left behind.

Here on another Memorial Day, in fields of flowers, we salute and celebrate our unforgotten.

They who donned the uniform and wore it dutifully while they lived.

They who will surely wear it proudly for all the rest of time.

Forevermore.

As the Big Parade marches on, into the beyond.

I couldn't figure out how to post the pictures, so go HERE to NY Daily News and take a look at the faces, remember the names, of some of America's finest. And give thanks.