Irony?

In 480 BC the Persian attacked the Greeks at Salamis. The Greeks were then still a weak amalgam of city states but under the Themistocles they managed to totally defeat the Persians under Xerxes. Prior planning prevents poor performance.

As I had noted years ago:

When you flew into the old Athens airport, the flight frequently came in over a small island just to the west of Piraeus, where the airport was located. Piraeus is just a few kilometers from the city of Athens, a short cab ride into town. The island that the flight passes over is generally innocuous, a small piece of land with a small inlet. Nothing much to look at. In the heat of a Greek summer day, the person arriving at the old airport could have looked out of the cab window as they drove to their hotel and have seen ships, cargo and oil vessels, in the harbor and the small island and inlet just rising in the background. In the heat of the Greek summer there is a slight haze but the view is unobstructed. 

The island that one flies over and which one sees as a backdrop to the harbor is Salamis. If one has no knowledge of history, then this island is a meaningless lump of rock and soil between the mainland and the Peloponnesian peninsula. If one understands history then this piece of land is one of the most important landmarks in our Western history. It was where the squabbling Greeks managed to assemble together under the leadership of Themistocles in September 25 of 480 BC and destroy the Persian fleet and their army. Xerxes the Persian king sat on his portable golden throne and watched the rabble of democratic Greeks demolish his fleet. This action by a democratic people against the ravaging hordes from the east was pivotal in the development of Western democracies and thought. If Greece had fallen, the concepts we now hold from Greek democracy would have fallen and the works of Aristotle and Plato, not to mention the great Greek dramatists, would most likely have perished as well. 

Sitting at a bar at the Hotel Grand Bretagne in Athens on September 9, 2001, I was engaged in a discussion with a couple of Greeks and a Russian. We got around to Salamis. The Russian commented that we hear about Themistocles and Xerxes but we never hear about the Xenophon and other shipmates who were on the Greek triremes. Who were these men who dropped all their responsibilities to family and farm and joined in to protect their land. These men came from waring elements on the Greek mainland and the Peloponnese. My Russian friend went on to talk of many men who went to war, not the Generals, but the fighting men who are often not only forgotten but whose lessons have not been brought to the present. My two Greek friends agreed. At that time I had nothing to add to that conversation, war for some is a singular affair, for others it is a family matter. 

One of the observations of the poet Auden in his poem on “Hodge Looks Toward London” is the recognition that in England until the First World War no soldier’s name was ever remembered from a battle. In the United States the Civil War was out first War with the remembrance of the deaths of soldiers, and those remembrances were in the centers of the small New England Towns whose sons and husbands went to fight. One finds no such remembrances south of New England. The classic remembrance of course is the Wall for the Vietnam fallen. That is truly the first, a remembrance of the fallen men and women in Vietnam. In a strange way the newer WW II memorial is a throwback or possible even worse, it is a monument with few names, and names must be bought to subscribe. 
In hometowns there are monuments to this War with names, at colleges there are walls with the fallen, but at the national monument one cannot find those who have won distinguished service crosses or navy crosses. Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, Guadalcanal and the others are missing, the men, and the women, are missing. Just as Themistocles is the sole player remembered at Salamis, the national monument memorializes a few. Furthermore, monuments as we see them today remember the dead. 

The irony is that today the US President hosted the Greek Prime Minister. Getting tips?