Memorial Day 2005
By trevino Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (17) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Today is Memorial Day. Unlike many nations, the United States has two holidays commemorating its valorous of the battlefield: this one is for those who fell in that service.
There is little to be said about the dead of our wars that has not been said either as great rhetoric or cliche. We honor them, and in doing so we induct them into a mythos that is at once truth and lie. It is truth that in serving this nation, they died well and in a noble cause. It is a lie that they were, broadly, supermen of virtue, with that virtue made manifest by the circumstance of their deaths. They were like us: men and women of American cities, towns, and countryside who were called -- sometimes as volunteers, sometimes as draftees -- and who thereby found themselves in the most terrible of experiences on this earth. Some of them died differently from the others: their deaths were marked by such tremendous valor that we honor them in remembrance with medals or tales of great deeds. But the most common deaths are the inglorious ones: the errant mortar fragment in the heart; the broken neck in a crash. Those are the ways in which my two erstwhile Army friends recently died in Iraq. Neither had time for the final gesture or the blaze of glory, because death came for them as it usually does in war: swift, unexpected, and unchosen. We honor them nonetheless, and not just because they chose their perilous profession. Even if they had been draftees, even reluctant draftees, they would still be the embodiment of our nation at war: and in our republic, we are that nation. Not the king, as in earlier times, nor the party, as in latter-day autocracies, nor a malevolent god, as in the polities of our present foes. Literally and symbolically, because of what our country is, our soldiery fights and bleeds and dies in our stead. Not for us -- as us.
We owe them this holiday. Having demanded of them everything they had to offer -- and taken as well a grievous measure from those who loved them -- we owe them this. The Federal bureaucracy, endlessly concerned with cheap conveniences for its own workforce, has handed over this day as another in a surfeit of excuses for long weekends. Private America follows suit, and so this thing that we owe them becomes something instead for us. It may seem an absurd concern: in their debt we may be, but what can we give the dead? The impetus of a common humanity yields its answers upon reflection.
We can give them our remembrance, active and specific; not a generalized, perfunctory acknowledgment of sacrifice, but a real contemplation of real persons slain in our service.
We can keep faith with their cause, doing what we may to ensure that their deaths were not in vain so that they may have fallen in a victorious cause as harbingers of that victory.
We can care for their loved ones, assuaging in the small measure that we can the pain of their departure with the reality of our support for their welfare, material and spiritual, until they see their beloved again.
We can make sure their brothers in arms must not add to their ranks in the heavens except in causes that are good, just, and extraordinary.
Remember. Remember on this day. And remember that the roll call in the sky grows longer each day of the present war. I have had the privilege of working with our military at war in Iraq. Above is a photo of a young airman inside a C-130 at a Middle Eastern airstrip. He was 19 years old, lean, relentlessly efficient, and on his way to Iraq for the dozenth time. Every run into Baghdad meant dodging missiles and small-arms fire; in the flight immediately after this photo was taken, his craft had to release flares and manuver crazily to survive. That's a euphemism: what matters is not the aircraft surviving, but the men inside, including this teenage airman. He is so young. Too young to die. But if he does, it will be in the place of you and I. This is Memorial Day, and you must remember.
« Today is worthy of celebration — Comments (7) | Open Thread — Comments (28) »
Memorial Day 2005 17 Comments (0 topical, 17 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
On behalf of a grateful nation, we remember them today.
With Winston, it always seemed to be great rhetoric:
They never asked the question, "What shall we gain?" They asked only the question, "Where lies the right?"
Terence Raymond Roach, Jr.
2nd Lieutenant, USMC
KIA 2/8/1968, Khe Sanh, Tet
....is honored not just today, but every day we remember him and the cause in which he fought.
I do wish, however, that he could have lived to raise me. He died 3 months prior to my birth and I have to admit (selfishly) that I'd happily trade his sacrifice for the chance at a childhood.
Ah, the "what if" game. What if he had raised me? Would I be the person I am today? It's an impossible game to play. I've recently been in contact with a man who served with him until a few months before he died. Apparently Terry was a hero, among the last to die at Khe Sanh, saving others. Nice to know. He was also a true blue Marine, who planned to spend his life in the military.
What Terry's friend doesn't know (and what I won't tell him) is that in Terry's last letters home, he made his disillusionment with the Vietnam War crystal clear -- and with the "leadership" responsible for that quagmire. I sincerely doubt he'd have remained in the Marines.
But I never will know, not in this lifetime. I look forward to death and meeting my father (and C.S. Lewis, because I want to know what happened to Susan, dang it!).
I spent most of my life shrugging my shoulders and saying, "It's okay -- I never knew him, so I didn't lose anyone, really."
What rot. It took 8 years of sobriety and turning 37 (11 years older than he was when he was killed) to wake me up and spur me on to seeking more information -- and mourning what was and what might have been. My mother, for example -- she was a virtual shell of a woman for most of my childhood. For over a decade she would not talk about Terry -- not even when I asked what he was like. It was too painful...
Wow. Lotta stuff came out there. Pardon my logorrhea...
....but human:
.... I'd happily trade his sacrifice for the chance at a childhood.
Completely understandable.
As a Vietnam era vet who volunteered but missed serving there due to other overseas duty my feelings today are strangely ambivalent. While some Nam vets harbor animosity towards those who protested the war, none of my closest friends, including my brother do so. Most served in combat and still bear the mental and psychological scars. But Vietnam made sense to those of us on the lower rails of the economic ladder who could not escape the draft as we were fighting communism a thing at that time that seemed real. Is terrorism as real or have we instead made another tragic mistake in Iraq for another reason? Towards the end of our service time many wore peace symbols and hoped it would end soon. I still have that peace symbol.
Bring em home let the Iraqis sort out their own destiny as this nation once did.
Many names of HS friends appear on the black granite, I wonder what they would say?
Beautifully said.
Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is the least to be cheap and is never free of cost." -Robert A. Heinlein
Of my paternal grandfather's cousin, 2nd Lt. Clare Riley, Army Nurses Corps, 45th General Hospital, North Africa. She was the head nurse in the orthopedic ward of the hospital and died two days after her 30th birthday on 1 Jul 1943, being buried with full military rites in Casablanca.
Actually, we have three holidays for this purpose--Memorial Day, for the fallen; Veterans Day, for those who have come home; and Armed Forces Day, for those still serving.
I found this site. What a nice commemoration. As a mother, I know that I would be devastated at the loss of my son, and am so sorry for the mothers who have had to face that grief.
But how proud I am that families in America still raise children who willing fight and risk death to defend the nation. God bless this wonderful land and the people who serve.
Well said.
GO ARMY!