This Memorial Day We Remember
Today is Memorial Day, the day we honor those Americans who have given their lives in war. You might not know this from the newspaper or TV, though. The holiday seems to have become another excuse to sleep in and for retailers to sell everything from dryers to bed sheets. In fact, Memorial Day should be May 31, but since that’s a Thursday this year, the government moved it up so we could all enjoy a long weekend.
If you’re ever near Washington, D.C., be sure to stop by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Maya Lin’s elegiac wall is perfect, despite the controversy that erupted when her design was announced in the early 1980s. In fact, the two sculptures added to it to “balance” it out—overly literal figures of male and female soldiers — actually detract from the deep symbolism of Lin’s elegant design. Visitors leave mementos at the base of the wall that are deeply meaningful only to the person whose name is on the wall and the person who left it. In addition to the usual flowers, teddy bears, and uniform items, one time I saw a 45-rpm record of “Devil in a Blue Dress” by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. What did that song mean to whomever left it? Which name on the wall was it intended for? It was a haunting sight, that simple black disc propped forlornly against the base of the wall.
What saddens me, though, is that so much of our history is slipping away from our young people. The vast majority of them don’t have a clue as to the sacrifices that were made throughout the years in some really horrible places, such as Belleau Wood, Bastogne, Normandy, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Midway, Coral Sea, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, Hue, and the hundreds of other places from Iraq and Afghanistan to Korea, Vietnam, and two World Wars. There is a lot of history there and precious few of us who remember it. More of it needs to be taught in our schools, but even more of it needs to be remembered by adults so that they can tell future generations of Americans what a noble group of people we really are. To paraphrase Kennedy, we did these things not because they were easy, but because they were hard, and we did them so that a country that is the last best hope for freedom could long endure.
What saddens me, though, is that so much of our history is slipping away from our young people.
I would say that it’s being taken away, in our classrooms, on the television, even in other venues. A programmatic agenda now thrives in places where it didn’t before. That’s the power of Opinion Programming.
You got it… even the dang History Channel only shows Ice Road Truckers and Pawn Stars any more, not real programs on historial things. That’s bad. Brought down even by Snooki and company.
Yeah, but the History Channel is even more embarrassing than the replacement tripe it now uses when it does endeavor to recount the past. I recall a documentary it did on the Saracens wars and other early conflicts between civilization and Islam. The production heavily favored the Moslems, showing them as reasonable, worldly and sophisticated, and left the impression that the Europeans were backward heathens driven by ignorance and hate.
And it seems as if men like Chris Hayes agonize over rhetoric that shows him all those names of are just proof of his redefinition of the word “imperialism,” something the Left has to do since they can show no penchant for empire building in American history. Does anyone doubt America could own all the land from Alaska to Panama with little or no trouble? I wish he had the heart to agonize over the word “sacrifice” instead of coming off as a cold-hearted poindexter prone to over-thinking the simplest concepts.
Since I agree with everything you wrote, and you say
please allow me to thank you, Sir.
Countdown to 2012 – The Clueless Generation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50WHiYmOqTQfeature=relmfu
“Honor, Duty, Country.”
Army, 1977-1983, CONUS, FRG, Grenada.
For this Army Dad (whose son is thankfully a civilian again and all in one piece), this is a day filled with somber reflection and gratitude.
In January 2007, the 1st Battalion, 158th Infantry Regiment of the Arizona Army National Guard was called to active duty and deployed to Afghanistan. They were husbands, fathers, sons, and boyfriends. They were teachers, store clerks, engineers, and business owners. Their country called. They returned home March 2008. All but two:
Staff Sgt Charles Browning
Pfc Mykel Miller
“From this day to the ending of the world we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he who today sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”
Can’t wait for my generation’s war memorial. I’m guessing they are going to do the same damn thing as they did for our service ribbon and just wedge both conflicts together.
Greetings:
Back in the summer of last ’68, I was doing my military service down in Texas, which, after the Bronx, is the place I’d most like to be from. For several months, I was assigned to the base’s funeral detail. We would provide pallbearers and a rifle squad for those requesting military funerals in the local area.
Military-wise, it wasn’t bad duty. On the days when we weren’t scheduled for a funeral, we would spend several hours practicing our “drill & ceremonies” and a couple more squaring away our uniforms and equipment. On funeral days, we would head out as early as necessary on a 44-passenger bus, often in civilian clothes or else fatigues with our first-class uniforms and equipment in tow. Often we would change into our duty uniforms at the funeral home, once in the casket display room, or on the bus itself.
It being Texas and the Viet Nam war being in full swing, we often had several funerals a week to perform. There was a certain spectrum from the World War graduates through the Viet Nam casualties. The former might involve a local veterans’ group and an afterward BBQ or such. The latter were somewhat more emotionally raw as most of us were facing our own deployments in the near future.
Two funerals of the latter sort have stayed with me through the years. The first was of a young Private First Class who had been MIA for several months before his remains were recovered. I was on the pallbearer squad that day and when we went to lift the casket, it almost flew up in the air. There was so little of the young soldier left that we totally overestimated the weight we were lifting and almost looked decidedly unprofessional.
The other was that of a Negro Specialist 4th Class. I was in the rifle squad that day. In the rendering of military honors, there is a momentary pause between the end of the (21-gun) rifle salute and the beginning of the playing of “Taps”. It is a moment of profound silence in most cases. During that moment, the young soldier’s mother gave out a yowl from the depths of her grief that so startled me that I almost dropped the rifle out of my hands. That yowl echoes within me still.
I’ll readily admit that, as a result of my experiences, I became much imbued with a sense of duty and respect to and for our fallen. Hopefully, today, when our media do their reporting they will show some of the same and let “Taps” be played out in its entirety. It would be nice for a change.
Been there, done that. No active duty fallen, though. Still, some moments were wrenching.
Obama had a campaign commercial exploiting Memorial Day ON Memorial Day! It was about his commitment to Veterans. Isn’t this unprecedented? I wanted to vomit. Is there anything this man won’t exploit for personal gain?
Well, look at the polls of Veterans. They favor Romney over Obama by a large margin.
I said this then and I’ll say it now: Obama tried to take money from the VA, make returned injured troops pay large co-pays, was a part of the “we’ve lost in Iraq” Brigade, all of those little “incidents.”
We have long memories. This is the payoff.
No, there isn’t.
Why not?
One of the most solemn moments of my life was attending a memorial service at a WWII military cemetery near Bastogne (Ardennes, I think?), in the fall of ’77. My unit was sent to train with the Belgian Army for a week, and we took time out to visit Bastogne and the cemetery, and, with our Belgian host unit, perform a short memorial service, including the playing of Taps.
To stand on that soil, listening to that lonely bugle, looking out over the many, many hundreds of glistening white crosses, drove home to my heart the terrible price that has been paid for America’s liberty.
We must not forget. We must not let their deaths be in vain.
Memorial Day brings me terrible pain. I have a lot of bitter left for the way we were treated in the late sixties and seventies. I revere my comrades who gave all. But my contemporaries who spit on us as we returned can go to hell.