In My Time - Dick Cheney [120]
On June 8, 1991, we honored our troops in Washington. The day opened with a prayer service at Arlington National Cemetery, where we remembered those who had not returned and expressed our gratitude to the families who would mourn them forever. President Bush spoke about the dream of “a commonwealth of freedom” that is at the foundation of who we are as a people:
America endures because it dares to defend that dream. That dream links the fields of Flanders and the cliffs of Normandy, Korea’s snow-covered uplands, and the rice paddies of the Mekong. It’s lived in the last year on barren desert flats, on sea-tossed ships, in jets streaking miles above hostile terrain. It lives because we dared risk our most precious asset—our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives—the finest troops any country has ever had.
Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush (Official White House Photograph)
The president also talked about the yellow ribbons, perhaps one of the clearest signs that the stigma of Vietnam was gone. From the moment the conflict began, Americans across the nation began showing support for our troops by tying ribbons to trees and pinning them to lapels, joining, as President Bush said, “this nation’s hands and souls.”
I left Arlington National Cemetery and went to a reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue to watch our troops march by in a grand review. I couldn’t help but think of my great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who had marched in just such a parade after the Civil War. America had also welcomed her heroes home from World War I and World War II with parades through our beautiful capital city.
A few days later, New York City held a ticker-tape parade.
Ticker tape parade in New York City for troops returning from Desert Storm. Lynne and I, together with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf and their wives, rode at the front of the parade. (Rick Maiman/Sygma/Corbis)
Our troops marched through the Canyon of Heroes on a glorious spring day, and Colin Powell, Norm Schwarzkopf, and I were fortunate enough to join them along with our wives. American flags were everywhere, huge red, white, and blue balloons floated through the air, and the ticker tape and paper raining down on our troops soon got so deep that the street cleaners were darting into the street between the marching bands to try to clear the way.
Before the time of celebration was over, I placed two phone calls—one to David Ivry, who had been commander of the Israeli Air Force on June 7, 1981, when the Israelis conducted a daring raid to take out Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Although the Israelis had faced international condemnation for the attack, I believed they deserved our gratitude, and I wanted to thank Ivry. Without Israel’s courageous action we may well have had to face a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein in 1991.
I also called Ronald Reagan. We had won this war with the army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps he had helped build. I thanked him for his unwavering commitment to a strong national defense and his years of support for America’s military. I had a chance to visit with the former president the next month when I was in Los Angeles for a USO gala to welcome home the troops. I went to the Reagans’ home in Bel Air, where Mrs. Reagan greeted me at the door. She and the president showed me into their living room and directed me to take a seat in a big armchair. President Reagan pulled up a hassock so he could sit close as we talked about what was happening in the world. He concentrated on every detail I had to relate about our victory in the Gulf and he quizzed me about developments in the Soviet Union, which was now a very different place from when he had been in office. It was a great privilege for me to brief him on what I knew, because so much