Memorial Day, a Treasure Lost

Memorial Day, a Treasure Lost

As I approach this weekend, Memorial Day we call it, I’m drawn back to my roots years ago in the tiny town of Lock Seventeen, Ohio. I actually did my own census one time, being a weird kid, and we had seventy-five residents in Lock. There were eight or ten of us kids, then the parents, a few grandparents and a few others no one talked about.
In the general vicinity, about a mile behind our ‘main’ street was an old Civil War cemetery. Now 62 and looking back, I still remember all those ‘Memorial Days’ in Lock when the grey haired ladies, Daughters of the Republic they called themselves, would organize an event and all the kids in town were expected to participate.
It wasn’t my favorite thing to do. We’d work hard and memorize poems honoring men killed in battle from all wars. Then we’d go down there with these proud ladies in charge and men in uniforms that no longer fit and we’d hear speeches and they’d fire their guns and we kids would all go home and back to being kids.
The meaning of it all didn’t hit home until one Easter Sunday morning I went to one great neighbor, Virgil Lindon, a truck driver, to get my bike fixed. You see Virgil fixed everything for everyone in Lock. It was back in the day when helping others was well, normal. He’d be out driving truck all week and on Saturday morning he’d be walking the ‘street’ in Lock knocking on doors to see what needed done.
On this morning Virgil sat me down and told me why he couldn’t fix my bike on this one day. He told me about being on a Navy submarine in World War II that was hit by a Japanese torpedo and was unable to surface. He and the entire crew prayed as they worked to repair it. And on the third day, Easter Sunday, with hours of air left, they surfaced and were saved. So he honored that day each year.
But from Virgil I learned about the sacrifice men and women make in war and a little about the importance of what the Daughters of the Republic in Lock Seventeen were doing for us kids. Then I met another truck driver friend of Virgil’s one night and listened to a grown man, a Marine veteran of Iwo Jima tearfully recount only a few bits of ‘his’ war with Virgil. I started to get it, but not until I served myself would I really understand.
After joining the Marines two weeks out of high school I soon found myself in a place called Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. There was a small uprising there and few knew or remember what happened, in my company we suffered four killed and thirty six wounded on one hot afternoon. I had to kill my first person and at the same time held one Marine in my arms as he died. I remembered the grey haired ladies of Lock and the poems they made me recite as a snot nosed kid.
Then a few months later I’m in Vietnam, became a Scout-Sniper and got into it spending the next two years, my nineteenth and twentieth here on earth fighting in that war. It wasn’t long before I understood what Virgil and John, his Marine friend from Iwo were talking about. I really did learn we live in the greatest country on earth, not perfect, but the best the world has seen. And I learned as they say that freedom isn’t free.
I’m still reminded often of the morning after being overrun in Quang Tri’s famous Street Without Joy when I and my fellow snipers zipped thirty-five dead Marines into body bags. And how could I forget my sniper partner, a great young man from a quaint town on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, being blown into pieces from a mortar round between the legs.
Returning in early 1968 is a recurring memory, returning to, as John Denver said in one of his songs, to a place I’d never been before. No one, including my parents, wanted to hear about it. “Put that behind you boy,” they’d say. Fortunately for me I met a cute young lady that’s now been my wife for forty plus years and she wasn’t like that. But it was about then the seeds were deeply planted about the value of honoring those who serve.
My last few months in the Marines Corps were spent conducting military funerals for those who died in Vietnam. I worked in a Reserve Center in a town of about 100,000 people and we conducted an average of four funerals a week for the four months I served. That was sobering, seeing the end of those body bags after two years of convincing yourself they just went away.
Memorial Day is a long forgotten designation for taking the time, just one short day of the other 365, to silently say thanks and validate the sacrifice others have made on your behalf. That’s why it was established. Just a day to validate the pain and suffering that made all of your days in this one of a kind country possible.
I saw the pain firsthand about fifteen years after coming home when I had the opportunity to visit the small town where Perl, my partner blown apart by the mortar, lived. On two man sniper missions he told me all about his little hometown. He loved it there and when I drove in on a sunny August day it was just like he told me. That is until I met up with his Father.
We sat in the backyard as I told him about his son, my friend, a great Marine sniper. Then it was his turn. He was now graying, late fifties probably, and tears streaming down his cheeks as he recounted the loss of his oldest son. But that wasn’t all. Perl’s Mom had died two years after him at the ripe young age of forty-three. He said she was never the same and the Doctors couldn’t explain her passing, but she did.
The pain of war doesn’t end with the zipping of the body bags like I thought, it is actually the beginning. But we live in a time when all that is lost on all but a few. We no longer have the stomach for war, and war is what allows us to not have the stomach for it. I’m a Christian these days and wish we never had to fire a shot in anger at another human being. But also being a student of history, it’s hard to imagine that ever being the case. I pray and wish it were so, all the while being grateful for those brave young people willing to answer the call when shots are fired.
Memorial Day is a treasure. It is our opportunity to give a gift, the gift of caring, of love and validation to all those who have served this great nation. Oh we have a lot of problems to fix but we’re way ahead of second place. Name one other country people are dying to get in to, you can’t.
It’s time to get ready for my plane. I’m flying out to DC to participate in Rolling Thunder. What’s Rolling Thunder? It’s the 22nd Annual get together of bikers who ride from across the country, over 300,000 of them, will wait for five to six hours to ride down Constitution Avenue and to the Vietnam Wall in honor of POW and MIA’s and for Memorial Day.
You’ll have to excuse me but I must go now and be with over 500,000 of my closest friends who still treasure Memorial Day and the sacrifice of all those who give so much for America.