A Tribute to Our Armed Forces, Thank You.

(Please listen to the song )

A Memory Too Painful

I have had several people wish me a “Happy Memorial Day” today.  I just responded “You too”, because I don’t quite get the drift of the “Happy” part. 

When I was growing up, my Grandad and I would go on this “Happy” day to the cemetery to decorate the graves of my grandmother, mother, and my mother’s father.  My grandmother, although not having actually served in the war, was one of those women who held the fort down while the men went off to war.  My mother, who was a nurse in several Army hospitals, contracted a lung disease from caring for soldiers and marines who served in the Pacific theatre of WWII, and eventually died at a young age from this.  My mother’s father, whom I never met, served in WWI, as did my Grandad. 

I never remember seeing a happy face at the cemetery.  I do remember seeing others bowing reverently to lay flowers on a grave, sitting beside graves with tears on their faces, driving away in silence from the cemetery.  I never questioned why until I was older. 

I was going through a box of old stuff and found letters that my Grandad had written to my grandmother from France.  He served there in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.  The letters were carefully stamped with an annotation that they had been screened by whoever did the mail screening and were ok to mail.  The letters were screened because they did not want the mail to be taken by the enemy and reveal anything of our strategies.  So I saw that the first thing my grandfather gave up, besides his own freedom, was his privacy. 

The second thing I noticed was my grandfather’s description of what was going on around him.  At the time, he was writing one letter, the troop had gone on a “short 80 mile hike” as he put it.  They were “resting” in an abandoned farmhouse, and he described the sound of the shells coming in and exploding around them. Another letter only says that he had a “mild” time at Argonne, compared to his fellow soldiers. 

I can begin to imagine that “mild” time.  Bombs bursting all around, the sound of gunfire and mortar shells exploding.  The scene I see is of a dark trench in the dirt, with soldiers being hit in the head with bullets, bodies of his fellow soldiers, most of them whom he knew from childhood, laying dead around him.  The scene makes me shiver with terror.  I try to imagine what he must have been thinking, and how he could have possibly ever made it out of there alive. 

My own father served in the South Pacific.  He was a marine, stationed on islands in Fiji.  He never talked about his experiences there, but it was evident in nearly everything he did that his experiences had a profound effect on him.  He was a sergeant, and that never ended.  We children were his “grunts” and several times in my life I was threatened with a court martial.  I never understood anything about this until one day, while sitting with him in the doctor’s office, he began talking.  At first, I thought he was talking to me, but as I listened, I heard him as though he was talking to someone else, someone long gone.  He was talking about planes falling from the sky, balls of flame coming down.  At one point, he gave a shout of despair as he stated, “that one was Jimmy!”  Then he proceeded to give orders to bayonet up and slash and stab. “Forward!” 

I watched him trembling in fear as we sat in that office.  I had never once heard him talk of his war experience, except to say that one day they bombed the island and a lookout tower fell on him and crushed his head. The end of that tale was that he was sent to a hospital in Guam, where he woke up, and was sent back to the island.  He recants it as though he were on a shopping trip to Wal-Mart. 

Although he lived through his war experience, he never lived past it.  It has consumed his dreams at night and his actions in the day.  At times when he is stressed, he goes into “Battle Mode” and starts swinging at anything that is around.  To those who have witnessed this, his fear is evident.  As children, we suffered from his abuse, never knowing that he was in battle mode, or that he could not help himself.  And so, for my father, although he survived the war, he never lived past it.  He gave his life up for the freedom of many just as surely as if he had died on that island. 

This Memorial day I want to remember this.  There are those who died for my freedom.  There are also those who fought for my freedom, came home, but never had a life of their own.  Those I wish to remember today are those Wounded Warriors who fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and so many other wars I cannot even name them.  Those who returned to the country, but never returned to their lives, and perhaps never will.  I want to thank them for sacrificing their lives and their freedom, for mine.  I hope our people, the American people, never forget that not only those that died gave all, but also those who came back gave all.  I, for one, promise never to forget them.