Warriors Move to the Sound of Gunfire
On this day, June 6th, 1944 the United States, Great Britain and Canada set forth to liberate Europe from Nazi control. The men who carried out the invasion helped establish that generation of Americans as “the greatest generation”. I have posed this question to many friends: “What if on Sept. 11th, 2001, the four passenger planes used as missiles that fateful day had been loaded with the men of D-Day, and they were still young at the time?” Most have agreed the hijackers would have been put down immediately by these warriors. Maybe they would have sustained injuries from the box cutters that the terrorists used, but these men would have, at a minimum, taken the terrorists by force and held them until the aircraft could land, if not outright killing them. The fourth plane, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, did have a group of men that decided to take matters in to their own hands, being remembered by the famous words attributed to Todd Beamer, “Let’s Roll.” In the U.K. on June 3rd, 2017, several men did take matters in to their own hands and saved an untold number of potential victims.
We all better learn from their heroics, because more attacks are coming and there simply are not enough security forces to stop these attacks from occurring, not all of them. There are too many terrorists, radicals, anarchists, whatever you want to call them, to be watched 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 etc. Well respected security experts from Israel, Europe, U.K. and the United States have warned over and over that “We have to be right 100% of the time, but the terrorists will slip through and make successful attacks on soft targets because we just do not have capability to stop them all.”
Not everyone has to step up in the face of danger like Roy Larner and Florin Morariu did this weekend in London, but everyone needs to be more prepared than they are today. It is becoming more and more the responsibility of everyone out in public to be aware of their surroundings and be able to act at a moments notice, even if that is just making a 911 call with locations, descriptions of attackers, and how they are armed. Sadly, this is the new world in which we live, and with news breaking today of a possible new attack in Paris, we may never be able to go back to the way things were unless we adapt to the threats we face.