A Powerful Message to Share

President Ronald Reagan had such a wonderful way with words in praising our country and expressing his appreciation and love for its people and the amazing things they have accomplished as free men and women. They have more than carried their weight to spread the freedom they've enjoyed to others throughout the world. In the following video sent by BCRW President Carolyn Webb, Reagan gives us a powerful message that really must be heard and passed on...

Cudos to HyperPixels.com for this video. See rough transcript:

Freedom is not free | A Soldier's Pledge

If we looked for the answer why, that for so many years we achieved so much; prospered like no other people on earth, it was because, here in this land, we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been hight but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

Those who say we're in a time when there are no heroes... they just don't know where to look. The sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row after row of simple white markers bearing crosses or stars of David, they add up to only a fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom. Each one of those markers is a monument to the kind of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places like Belleau Wood, the Argon, Omaha Beach, Salearno, and half way around the world on Guadalcanal, Terawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and the jungles of a place called Vietnam.

Under one such marker lies a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There on the western front he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy enemy fire. We're told, that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading "My Pledge" he had written these words: "America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice. I will endure. I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the whole issue of the struggle depended on me alone."

We must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. It is a weapon that we, as Americans, do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors. As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it, we will not surrender for it, now or ever.

We are Americans.

--Ronald Reagan