Memorial Day 2010: A day to remember, a day to honor
We try to remember the soldiers of the past. We mark the historic days and the anniversaries. We fly the flag, we hold parades, we visit the cemeteries, we report observances through TV and print.
But for those who were not there, whose lives are young, those wars are all ancient history. The Revolution, the War Between the States, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, even the first Gulf War today often are mere words in history books, emotionally incomprehensible to a generation that until just recently had never known a "real" war.
We prayed that these young people would never know battle, but we wanted them to understand it. We wanted to tell them what it was like, as our great-grandfathers told us about World War I, our grandfathers about World War II and Korea, and our fathers about Vietnam and the Gulf. Like them, we struggled to answer our children's questions. Why did we go to war, Dad? What was it like, Mom? We search for words.
How do you explain trench warfare, the Marines at Iwo Jima, the explosion that sank the USS Arizona, killing more than 1,700 and entombing more than 900? How do you explain the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the most recent memories are of swift skirmishes far away, of high-tech planes making pilotless, high-tech assaults high above the ground where the bodies lie, of scenes on the TV screen that even today hardly seem real.
So how do we answer our children's questions about Memorial Day?
How do we explain to the children that nations go to war but real people fight them and real people die in them, even as the real people who have experienced the horrors of war first-hand fade away? In an age of satellite communications, Interstate highways and coast-to-coast jet flights, how do we explain the tragedy of the American Civil War, in which nearly every family in the nation was affected by the death and destruction? In a time when e-mail can travel around the world in minutes, how do we explain the loneliness and fear of the men and women of an earlier generation who filed onto a troop ship that would take them to another continent where they would wait for months at a time for a letter from home? How do we explain the joy (and guilt) of being among the lucky ones to return years later?
We try to honor them through memorials, from statues of generals on horseback, to the solemn Vietnam Wall, the grim yet inspiring Korean War Memorial, and now the epic National World War II Memorial that was dedicated just a few years ago in Washington, D.C.
But memorials are harsh, made of bronze and stone. So how do we explain the tears that well in our eyes as a finger traces the outline of another name on the Vietnam Wall, that overpowering testament to all that war is: death and death and yet more death? A father tries:
I remember warm summer days on a baseball diamond when I was pitcher and he was catcher. You can do it, he'd say, and for a few minutes I really believed it. The future was endless then. We were young and happy, and we thought life was just sunny days and endless baseball games.
We were wrong, of course. I remember sadder days. No longer children, the pitcher went off to college and the catcher joined the Marines, proud to serve his country. I remember the letters -- oh, yes, I remember -- sitting safe in my college dorm, absolved of the war as long as I kept my grades up. And how one day a small clipping from a hometown newspaper arrived in the mail: My friend, my catcher, was dead, in Vietnam.
How could he have died in a jungle so far away? I cried for him then -- for a couple of skinny kids on a baseball field on a sunny day; for our youth; for all the young lives snatched from us; for my not being there to tell him, You can do it. And I cry for him still -- I cry for all of us.
We speak to that son and daughter of the profound sadness we feel as we walk among the rows of small white markers, the marble headstones that distinguish the resting places of so many who gave so much in the wars that mark more than 230 years of a nation's experiment in freedom. How can we make these young minds understand that, though we never met these soldiers of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and so many of the other wars churning down through history, we indeed do know them?
Every name engraved on the Vietnam Wall, every white stone in the graveyard could easily be ours or a friend's.
Every one marks the death of someone very much like you, my son, and you, my daughter; men and women (boys and girls really) who lived lives very much like ours, who played baseball and hopscotch on sunny days, who dreamed of careers and love in the immortal days of youth, and who surprised themselves by dying far away because their country said it needed them.
How do we tell our children that we want them to understand this thing called war deeply and fully, but at the same time that we do not want them to learn from the reality of the bunker and the jungle?
The best we can do is to remind them that real people, no different than them, gave their lives so that we might be here to struggle with our children's questions today -- and to try to remember.