While tributes to Americans who had lost their lives in battle had been held in a number of towns across the nation one of the more well-known stories about the beginnings of Memorial Day is the story about General John Logan.

Nowadays many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored and worse neglected.

My fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights ' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Americans like fat books and thin women.

It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.

And of course in the Philippines there were so many thousands of Americans that were captured by the Japanese and held and who were rescued by Filipino Americans or Filipinos I should say and by U.S. troops near the close of the war.

World War II the atomic bomb the Cold War made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts which was the way we did before 9/11 and then looking at 9/11 and saying 'This is not a criminal act ' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan kill 3 000 Americans blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.

We are Americans when we go to war and when we return we are Mexicans.