This weekend, America
celebrates Memorial Day. This last Monday in May has come to mean a number of
things; the end of the school year and the commencement of summer vacation. For
those of us living along the Atlantic Seaboard, Memorial Day marks the
beginning of beach season as well as the time we begin casting a leary eye to the
tropics as the six months long hurricane season begins June 1.
This weekend our airwaves and
internet screens will pound us with non-stop commercials. Everything from
furniture to clothes to cars will be on sale under banners of red, white and
blue. American flags will make their appearances on front porches and mailboxes
this weekend. This salute to nationalism will build to a crescendo on the
Fourth of July weekend, with its own round of sales and a barrage of fireworks
that will keep our dogs and cats on edge into the wee hours all weekend. The message
from this juxtaposition of nationalism with an orgy of materialism could not be
any clearer: Do your patriotic duty, be a
good consumer.
Lost in this tsunami of
commercial advertising, flag waving, beach trips, barbeques and beer is the actual
reason for Memorial Day. There is no small amount of irony in this celebration
of unabashed consumerism and vacation season that Memorial Day is ultimately a
day of mourning, of remembering the dead from the near continual wars America
has fought since its founding. It is not about freedom (that’s Independence
Day) and it’s certainly not about consumerism (that’s the Christian holiday
which formerly celebrated the birth of Jesus).
It’s about the fallen.
Paying the Ultimate Price
Memorial Day is designed to
recall the human costs of war in a very intentional manner. In American terms
(counting only American casualties, excluding those of allies and foes), that number is currently 1.1 million.
The American Civil War, which
Memorial Day first commemorated, was the costliest military engagement with a
half million American soldiers killed in that five year internecine struggle to
the death. World War I would be sold to the Americans as “the war to end wars”
but the just over 100,000 American casualties in that event would pale in
comparison to those of the World War II which arose out of the failures of WWI
to resolve the issues which gave rise to it. The two world wars together would equal
the Civil War in casualties.
Since WWII, about 160,000
American soldiers have lost their lives in places as far flung as Southeast
Asia, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. But while WWI ostensibly was fought to
end wars and WWII to save the world from totalitarianism, the goals of wars
since the middle of the 20th CE have been far less clear.
These latter day wars were initially
sold to the American public under urgent imperatives of halting a red menace,
protecting nations from toppling like dominos to godless communism. More recently
wars have been sold as “defending freedom” against a vague foe of terrorism. While
the actual threat to American interests from these highly caricaturized
bogeymen has been at best mixed, what is clear in retrospect is that the global
corporations who benefited from these wars, particularly petrochemical and
military-industrial interests, appear to have set the agenda for American
foreign policy.
It has proven to be an agenda
paid for with the blood of working class American kids. They were dispatched into
harm’s way by power holders whose own children have been exempted from an
innocuous sounding “volunteer” army whose “volunteers” were actually driven there
by the desperation of a poverty draft. Indeed, the vast majority of those authorizing these ongoing
invasions and occupations themselves found ways to dodge the mandatory draft
that the children of the working and middle classes faced during the Vietnam era
of the 1960s and 70s.
It’s always easy to send
someone else’s kid to war.
Roots of a Commemoration
It is unclear where the
practice of honoring the war dead on a particular day began. Decoration of the
graves of war dead predates the Civil War but there is no indication it ever
occurred in a routine practice until that time.
One of the more interesting roots
of Memorial Day arose during Reconstruction in Charleston, SC. David Bight of
the Teaching A People’s
History program provides this
account:
After a long siege…the beautiful port city of Charleston,
South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the
spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late
February….
1865 view of the Union soldiers graves at Washington
Racecourse. Library of Congress.
Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves,
remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their
sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events…took place on May
1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the
planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an
outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior
of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried
in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to
the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the
cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on
which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people.”
Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people.”
The first annual
commemorations of the Civil War dead were observed at various times of the year
in numerous cities in the north and the south many of which lay claim to being
the birthplace of this rite of remembrance. Initially celebrated as holidays by
the various states, by the turn of the 20th CE, Memorial Day was celebrated
nation-wide on May 30. After WWI, the
commemoration of war dead was extended to all who had died in the armed
services of the United States and in 1971 Congress made the last Monday of May
a national holiday on which Memorial Day was to be celebrated.
The Bivouac of the Dead
Historically there have been two
major means of socially constructing American wars. The first tends to
construct war in the abstract, not only minimizing the suffering of those
required to fight it but often erasing from recorded memory those impacted by
it:
·
The soldiers
themselves, whose flag draped coffins returning from battlefields across the
globe today are rarely permitted to be photographed by news media;
·
The families on both
sides of the war who are left behind, anxiously awaiting news of their loved
ones, some never to know their fate;
·
The general populace of
conflicted nations, their elderly and children alike, now targets of
hostilities which over the last century inexorably shifted from battlefields intentionally
located outside settlements to the cities themselves. The total wars of the 20th
CE would now target homes, businesses and places of worship, stripping their slain
inhabitants of their very humanity in accounting for their deaths as “collateral
damage.”
In such constructions, spun by
governments and willingly propagated up by a media more often serving as
cheerleader than critic, war is always self-evident, obvious, the only possible
choice. It is inevitably spun in heroic terms as serving national interests if
not larger than life heroic concerns for democracy and freedom themselves.
The run-up to war is marked by
excitement, effusive displays of militarism conflated with nationalism such
that any opposition to war is routinely seen as unpatriotic. Appeals to the manhood
of the young human grist for the mill of death are relentless and highly effective.
Erich Remarque offers a classic depiction of this seductive call of Thanatos in
All
Quiet on the Western Front, seen here, in which a
teacher entrusted with the well-being of young students actually serves as the
recruitment agent for the armed forces.
Ironically, it is always the
writers, the artists, the poets, the song writers and film makers who offer the alternative constructions of war, visions which largely serve to deconstruct the
first. They tell the stories of death and suffering, stripping away facades of nobility,
honor and heroism. In a society heavily invested in death-denial and more than
willing to buy into guilt assuaging self-deceptions, these are the bold truth
tellers. They do not worship at the altar of Thanatos; they lament war and
mourn its sacrificial victims.
At the Veterans’ Administration website which
provides a limited history of Memorial Day, a poem by a former Confederate
officer in the Civil War reflects the somber tone of Memorial Day remembrances
of the fallen:
THE MUFFLED drum's sad roll has beat, The soldier's last
tattoo; No more on Life's parade shall meet. That brave and fallen few. On
Fame's eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards,
with solemn round, The bivouac of the dead.
– Theodore O'Hara, “Bivouac Of The
Dead”
But not all will return.
Wilfred Owens poem “Dulce et Decorum” speaks the horror of
seeing one’s comrades die before them, his own in the gas-filled trenches of
Europe during WWI. Owens, like Remarque’s Paul, wants nothing to do with the
heroic spin that accompanied him and others into the hell holes of war,
concluding his classic poem with these words:
If you could hear, at
every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from
the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable
sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would
not tell with such high zest
To children ardent
for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et
Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(Lat. It is sweet and right to die for one’s country)
A half century later, veteran and poet Randall Jarrell
would refrain this sentiment with his WWII era poem, “The Death of the Ball
Turret Gunner”
From my mother’s
sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its
belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth,
loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak
and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they
washed me out of the turret with a hose.
And I have never wept alone.
It is songwriters such as Paul Hardcastle whose hit song “19” was
released on the eve of Memorial Day in 1985, who remind us that of those who
did come home, many returned very different human beings from those to whom we
said goodbye at the train stations. Beginning with the observation that “In
World War II the average age of the combat soldier was 26, In Vietnam he was
19,” Hardcastle notes that
Many vets complain of
alienation, rage, or guilt
Some succumb to
suicidal thoughts
Eight to Ten years
after coming home almost eight-hundred-thousand men are
still fighting the
Vietnam War
Requiem for a Soldier
In thinking about Memorial Day, a day to remember the dead
and the walking wounded, a day of mourning, to feel the sorrow for young lives
ended prematurely, I have found one tribute to the fallen which rises above the
others.
In 2001 HBO created a 10 episode miniseries about a parachute
regiment during WWII entitled “Band of Brothers,” taking its title from a
speech by Henry V to his troops in Shakespeare’s play with the same name. What
makes this series remarkable is its very real depiction of the soldiers
therein. They face dangers, endure horrendous conditions, all the while
exhibiting the loyalty to their comrades, a true brotherhood, that so many will miss upon making the
return home.
But it is the care with which directors Stephen Spielburg
and Tom Hanks craft their humanity that makes them real. There is no
militaristic flag waving accompanied by smarmy country songs. There are no
parades or fireworks. These soldiers suffer. They weep. They laugh. They
celebrate. They mourn. They are not larger than life.
They are very human.
They are very human.
Each episode in the series opens with a film montage of these very human beings accompanied by one of the most haunting songs I have ever heard. Entitled Amici Forever, Requiem for a Soldier, it is dignified, poignant, a fitting tribute to the dead and to those who survived.
This Memorial Day, take the two and a half minutes to
watch this
beautiful homage to the fallen soldiers we are called to remember this weekend.
For just a moment, forget the sales, the beach, the barbeque. Just be present
for a moment with the suffering, the dying, those who survived and all those
they left behind.
Be present with them.
Weep with them.
Weep with me.
And then offer your prayer for lives so abruptly ended and
lives that wars inevitably change forever.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined
life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious
or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth
considering do not come in sound bites.
Do not be daunted by
the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly
now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to
abandon it. – Rabbi
Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Ages,
Commentary on Micah 6:8
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