Those of us who have not ourselves served in the military but who were reared in homes where our fathers and/or mothers, brothers, and sisters have served, often treat Memorial Day much as those of us who have left the church while our parents remained true to the faith treat Easter and Christmas. Yes, we pay public homage to their service and sacrifice as well as to their beliefs, but often we do so with a private sense of what I call “intimate detachment.” We do not share the core experiences, the life-defining curriculum, of war or God.
Allow me to explain.
We love and honor those family members who did and do what we were never called to, or called to do. We revere them. On Memorial Day we imagine their experiences, listen to their stories, maybe watch the old movies, maybe attend a parade or ceremony, share a meal and a prayer, and immerse ourselves in times and places that help define them for us, and yet—and yet—we never quite get it. We can’t. We weren’t there.
Perhaps that is one reason why we continue to honor all those who served the cause of freedom. These are the brave among us who actively took up arms against dictators and murderous ideologies, whose actions changed the world for the better, and who, if they were lucky, returned home to live with a curious admixture aftermath of the horrors of war and the great spiritual/emotional/physical bonding of brothers in arms. For those who were not as lucky, for those who died “over there,” we all share a responsibility to remember not only their ultimate sacrifice, but also the deep loss to those they left behind. For none of them who can be named or known died alone.
But there are also those who were fortunate enough to return home from war, but who did so with injuries, disabilities, and wounds that never fully healed. My father was one of those men. He returned from WWII and 16 missions as a radio operator on a B-17 a changed man. He was a decorated “war hero” although he hated that label, never took his Purple Heart and Air Medal out of their boxes, stored as I found them in pine box in the basement, buried along with his high school yearbook and what I imagined as his pre-war innocence.
His war was over on August 1, 1944. He was 21 years old. He would live another 32 years in more or less constant pain with 17” of shrapnel resting against his sciatic nerve. Although he was told he wouldn’t walk again, he did, and proudly so, which was why he refused surgery to remove the shrapnel, a procedure that had a high probability of leaving him unable to walk again. He married Naomi, my mother, in 1947, and entered a career in a clandestine agency at about the same time. Under diplomatic cover he worked the cold war in Rome, London, and Washington, D.C., and as I have described in detail in my family memoir, other far less illustrious places based on his own cold war with James Jesus Angleton. Let’s just say here that war ended badly for both of them, but my father died first, at 53, under mysterious circumstances.
These broad outlines tell about his life, but they do not tell the whole story. They do not tell of what today we term “post traumatic stress disorder” and for which there is sympathy and treatment, but was for my father perceived as a source of weakness and shame and was left untreated. So it was that my childhood was punctuated with his “night terrors” and “bad dreams” journeys into the past world of bombing that left him sweating profusely, shaking uncontrollably, with a fixed stare of horror on some image he couldn’t shake. My mother, a nurse, held him until he returned to our world. The drugs didn’t help. The booze didn’t help either. Together, they made for a toxic mix.
Yet through all of these bad nights and clandestine days he worked hard, did well enough, and was kind and loving to my mother and me. He was a good man.
There were, and there are, millions of men and women like my Dad. There were, and there are, tens of millions of people like me and my mother--sons and daughters, brothers, sisters, and spouses--who were witnessed to this unspoken history of warriors who return home changed forever by their experiences, sometimes in ways that forever alter other lives. We too, are veterans. Not of foreign wars, maybe, but of the foreignness of war brought home.
That is what I mean by “intimate detachment.” We do not know war firsthand. But our secondhand experiences, along with those firsthand experiences of those who served in the military, are part of what I honor each and every Memorial Day.
It is a day that I always end in the same way, with a prayer for Peace.