Three-day Fling or Solemn Day of Homage?

Somewhere in the cloud that was Memorial Day, between jammed roads, police calls, frayed nerves, and maybe a barbecue with family or friends, there were local observances to remember the nation’s war dead.
Fewer old veterans attend them each year as they switch sides, from those saluting to those being saluted.
Too bad some of those hallowed events caused traffic slowdowns or inconveniences to travelers to this southern peninsula, but war is never convenient. Someone even had the audacity to call war hell, which it truly is to those tasked with fighting and dying.
Young people, enjoying the fruits of liberty, prosperity and peace, cannot fully understand why gray haired men and women spend time on, what to them is merely a national day off that starts summer, to listen to speeches about patriotism and place floral wreaths at the base of monuments, listen to “Taps” and maybe cry.
War is not truly real to this generation, although they’ve watched it on the television news, or seen it in today’s grim photos of death and destruction in Iraq or Afghanistan. Possibly war takes on added meaning when brothers or sisters are placed in harm’s way while wearing the uniform of our nation.
Death of a serviceman or woman is never “here,” it’s always down the street, or up in the next county. The processions are never for “our” flesh and blood, always someone else’s.
Too many are detached from the fear that chills a soldier’s or marine’s blood as a bullet rips through the night or when a mortar erupts and screams are heard.
To a generation raised with clever electronic games when virtual bullets are fired at “enemies” on a LCD screen and death is merely a way to score points, war is just another game. It has no face, no human cost to them.
As each veteran is “frozen” in time with his or her war, so it is with me. I recently re-read Neil Sheehan’s “After the War Was Over” about life in Hanoi and Saigon for Vietnamese who fought each other during our involvement.
It paints a portrait of Communist Viet Cong, who were victorious, and are revered as patriots to their cause once we withdrew in 1975. Those who took up arms against them, and sided with us, paid a heavy price being accorded second-class citizenship. Many South Vietnamese war dead, once considered “friendly,” lie in untended graves, spurned for actions they took against their countrymen. How sad.
I thought back, reading the names of those distant places, Da Lot, Cu Chi, An Bac, Bien Hoa, how “clinical” the war seemed to me as I watched it pass my eyes on teletype messages.
As part of a radioman’s work, I logged messages as they were relayed from Washington to Guam and Vietnam. There was little time to read and digest what the messages contained as they pounded letter after letter on yellow paper.
There were acronyms like “KIA” and “MIA” followed by numbers. There were orders to strike targets. There were at times other acronyms, “ARVN” and “NVA.” Honestly, there was no humanity in any of them. They were mere letters and numbers. Never was there the cold realization that behind each number was a human, perhaps my age, regardless whether it was one of ours or “one of them.”
Wounded were mentioned, but never did I hear the screams of that man whose body was shattered terribly by a land mine or grenade, who would never again be able to function as a whole person.
I never saw a buddy literally vanish from sight as so many veterans did. Not once did I have a friend who went on patrol, was captured, and was never seen again, dead or alive.
Never did I have to follow an order to take another human’s life, and carry that terrible picture around in my mind for the rest of my life.
I’ve experienced the unanswerable question a Gold Star Mother asks, “Why did it happen to him?”
I pity military chaplains who had to hear that inquiry repeatedly, about 56,000 times in the Vietnam War era. They hear it still today.
That was just from “my” war. I was not around when mothers and fathers asked similar questions in the Civil War or Spanish American War or World War I and World War II and Korea.
Today’s veterans will also be frozen in time with their desert wars. Will they venerate their war’s dead as we did Monday? Will respect continue?
It seems our national lot is to forever order our best men and women onto battlefields in far off lands whose places we can barely spell or pronounce. That is the way we have come to know and expect.
Will Memorial Day ever mean what it should to young people who never experienced war? Probably not. Not until they go through a “valley,” and experience what their grandfathers and great-grandfathers felt and saw and smelled, then tried hard to forget, yet never could.
Until that time, Memorial Day will remain a three-day holiday, a 72-hour span in late May that kicks off summer. It a time to sell carpets and cars, grills and beer.
To old veterans, there will always be a time to recall those who paid dearly for the liberties we all enjoy, even though we don’t appreciate them.
How I wish Memorial Day’s meaning could be passed to the next generation without them having to experience its horrors and pain. That will never happen, since humans refuse to cultivate the sense to learn from the past.
We continue repeating the same behavior, yet expect different results. Is that not madness?