5/27/2008 - AFS Fallen Heroes - Memorial Day 2008

Almost 5,000 Ambulance Drivers served with AFS during the two World Wars—and all of them were volunteers. During Second World War 36 of them died, 68 were wounded in action and 13 were prisoners of war. To commemorate humanitarian service of AFS Ambulance Drivers who made the supreme sacrifice we enclose excerpts from a tribute by Norman Eddy at a Memorial Service held in New York in 1961. Mr. Eddy is an AFS WWII Driver and Life Trustee.

“The memories of those with whom we served during the war have in part been buried by the piling up of a hundred thousand events during the years since 1945. Yet from time to time, at unexpected moments, a face in the crowd has recalled an old friend, or a movie thrust us back to Italy, or India or France. On a long drive alone at night, the thought of a friend who died in the war has risen out of the recesses of the mind to clutch our heart and to leave it momentarily cramped in pain.

How can we with the most integrity honor our friends? Without even knowing each one of them, we know them well. They were much like us each highly individualistic. Each had joined the American Field Service for his own unique reason, mingling idealism with quest for adventure. How can we properly honor them?

Our remembering of our friends who are dead is, today, our link with a reality of our own past which we dare not forget. The idealism, the friendships and affections, the growth in understanding afforded us by our times during the war is quickened to life by the memory of their deaths.

At the same time that the war was coming to close, a new life was stirring in the American Field Service. We find in our midst today the living memorial for those who died and to our own ideals. A magnificent tribute to youth, to international understanding, to human freedom, and to individuality which we once prized so highly, has burgeoned. Thousands of youths – come from the scores of countries each year. The continuation of the American Field Service in new form, is a tribute not only to the work and vision of one man and his co-workers but also to the eternal urge of man to rise above himself.

To honor our friends we can rekindle the idealism they embodied and which we shared. In the hope inspired by the thousands of students who come to our country, we can make our pledge to help build and continue the AFS of the future, so that liberty and justice for all may at last become a reality.”

AFS honors those “who gave their all”.