(HOST) On this Memorial Day weekend, commentator Willem Lange will remember a place in Europe where Americans are loved without reserve.

(LANGE) It was the feast day of La Madonna Della Grazie - Our Lady of Grace - in the Italian town of Nettuno on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The esplanade was alive with games of chance, pasta and gelato stands, and freelance salesmen of genuine Rolex watches at amazing prices. The parade flowed down the boulevard between the esplanade and the beach front hotels, led by priests shouting the litany through bull horns.

As obvious tourists, we were removed a bit from all the fun. People were polite to us, even deferential, but not warm. Then, as a delegation of dark suits paraded past, I asked the man beside me, in mangled Italian, if these were the heads of the community.

"Ja," he answered. "Die Bergermeistern." So that was it!

"No, no!" I protested, pointing to myself and shaking my head. "Io non tedesco! Americano!" ("I'm not a German. I'm a Yank!")

"Oh! I'm so sorry!" he cried. What happened next is called, I think, an abraccio - and for the next few minutes my wife, daughter and I were the center of a little circle of affectionate Italians.

Next day we found out why. Just west of Nettuno lies the town of Anzio, where Allied armies made a hotly contested landing behind German lines in 1944. At the northern edge of Nettuno lie several military cemeteries. The American one features neat lines, heartbreakingly long, of white crosses and Stars of David, marking the graves of almost eight thousand American servicemen. Two American flags fly from staffs on either side of a colonnaded entrance. On the walls are engraved the names of over three thousand American servicemen whose fate has never been learned.

They died in the bloody battles in Sicily and up the boot of Italy against stubborn German resistance. The folks of Nettuno remember. For my part, I've never been prouder to see the American flag flying anywhere.

Here at home, we seem to have forgotten what sacrifices that awful war exacted from us. Our memories are stunted, our sensibilities numbed. Abu Ghraib seems to have slipped into the historical tense. Guantanamo, which any free American should deplore and the UN has condemned, is still in full swing. We're told that our government has never shipped prisoners to countries where interrogation is likely to lead to death. Repressive Communist Cuba gets an embargo; repressive Communist China gets most-favored-nation trade status. The electorate simmers, but never seems to boil over.

Meanwhile, the sight of a large enameled American flag waving proudly on the lapel of any patriot who himself avoided war turns my stomach. I'll take the honest flags waving proudly over the silent dead at Anzio.

This is Willem Lange up in Orford, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work.