ON MEMORIAL Day, we remember how easy it is to forget.
So begins a remarkable op ed in today's
Boston Globe, By James Carroll, it has the title
Together we remember - and forget. I urge you to read it. For example, consider this paragraph:
It is said that America is uniquely defined more by the future than the past. Perhaps believing that, Americans have often made mistakes in memory, with dread consequences. To have had the Vietnam War required forgetting Korea. To have had the first Gulf War required forgetting Vietnam. To have the present war in Iraq required forgetting — well, a host of wartime lessons. And to maintain its Cold War nuclear arsenal, America needs to forget Allied terror bombing in 1945, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We are now in the Sesquicentennial of the war that led to this holiday, originally known as Decoration Day. It should be a defining moment of our national history - from this war in some ways we finally became a nation - in this war the military units were still organized by states - 24th Massachusetts, 20th Maine - and only after this war did the 14th Amendment finally define citizenship on a national basis.
But as Carroll reminds us,
this war is rarely remembered in its most important aspect — death. But death is what this holiday was meant to emphasize.
Let us consider death.
There was an editorial in the Washington Post honoring Maryland's last living Medal of Honor Recipient, Paul Wiedorfer, who died last week at 89. As is often the case, death was a part of his winning the Medal, the death he caused, in order to save the lives of others. That part of the editorial reads:
On Christmas Day 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Wiedorfer’s platoon was ambushed in Belgium by two concealed German machine gun emplacements. Pinned down, helpless, the unit seemed in danger of suffering heavy casualties, when Mr. Wiedorfer took the initiative. “I was probably a little nuts when I did it,” he told the Baltimore Sun in an interview a half-century later. “But someone was going to die if something didn’t get done.” He ran as best he could across a 120-foot stretch of open, snow-covered ground toward the guns. “Miraculously escaping injury,” as his medal citation put it, he got to within 10 yards of the first machine gun nest, threw in a hand grenade, and shot and killed the three German soldiers manning the gun. He then attacked the other gun, killing one of its crew. Six more quickly surrendered to him.
Two months later Wierdorfer was badly wounded by mortar fire that killed the soldier next to him, and while in the hospital learned he had won this nation's highest award for valor. Yet that is not what stood out for me as I read the editorial. Rather, it was a simple expression from this common man, who said of himself "all I was, was some dogface guy in the infantry." As was true in most of our conflicts, he was not a professional soldier, and was proud of the sobriquet "dogface."
In an interview with his local paper in Baltimore a few years ago, he also offered what I consider a telling insight:
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Medal of Honor didn’t exist because there were no wars and we could all live in peace?’’
Let us consider death. So I said. So let me return to Carroll, and the Civil War, a technical term that does injustice to the degree of death and killing:
Even after the 20th century’s wars, the scale of death suffered in America between 1861 and 1865 is almost impossible to grasp. As Drew Gilpin Faust points out in “Republic of Suffering,” the nearly 700,000 killed then would equate in today’s population to about 7 million. The war that started out for “union” had to soon become a war for “freedom,” since only that transcendent purpose could justify the unleashed brutality. “Freedom” was thus permanently mystified in the American mind. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,” Lincoln declared.
.
Carroll reminds us that the language of sacrificial death - of dying on behalf of freedom, of something sacred about this process - can be traced back to this time in our history. After all, as he notes, in The Battle Hymn of the Republic we assumed for the Union's cause the mantl of Christ, as the words read As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free.
Somehow rereading those words in the context of Carroll's column this morning gave me pause.
I may now be a Quaker, but I understand however tragic it always is, war is sometimes unavoidable. Sometimes the violence it entails is the least possible evil among the choices before us.
I have also served during a conflict - Vietnam, in the Marines - although my own stateside service involved no battles, my conflicts limited to those among my superiors who somehow resented my ability to question authority without stepping outside the bounds of what was permissable (after all, I did not get court martialed). Still, I knew some who had returned from that conflict, and others who were heading out. Some of those I knew died in Southeast Asia, others were wounded, some severely. Later I would learn of college acquaintances scarred for life - psychically as well as physically - by their participation in that conflict.
But we were Marines. Like our entire military today, we were all volunteers. Every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman, even if like me one's Military Occupation Specialty is about as far from rifles as imaginable - 5565, Bandsman, Piano Player. At least potentially we could be engulfed in a firefight. We could find ourselves like the dogfaces of World War II, like the millions who engaged in our "Civil" War.
Carroll reminds us how one the next war is often possible only if we are willing to forget a previous war. Oh, we might argue that we had to oppose the expansion of Communism by framing it in terms of our failure to quickly oppose the expansion of Naziism. But after the fact we tend to forget the cost of war. After all, to give ourselves peace we want to remember the "glory" of victory. We elevated some military leaders to heroic status, often given them positions of political leadership and power for which they lack the requisite background, skill or temperament. Yes, some of our generals made good presidents, or even great presidents. Washington to be sure, perhaps Jackson and Eisenhower. Others were to put it mildly ineffective at best - Grant, Benjamin Harrison. In our own times we can see those whose claim to political leadership came solely from their military experience and question whether that should have been sufficient - Jeremiah Denton, Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
Consider this - between Truman and Clinton, every single man elected President had served in the military during World War II (Carter was at the Naval Academy, graduating in 1946).
Carroll reminded us that the rate of death in our internecine War between North and South had a death rate equal to more than 7 million of our current population. Yet now our conflicts are fought by perhaps 1% of our population, and because they are in some way all volunteers for all the honor we offer them the nation somehow does not feel the loss in the same way. The deaths do not have the same impact, nor are we as aware as we should be of the death and destruction they - and the CIA - acting ostensibly at our behest impose upon others.
Of greater importance - we are seeing a rise in the kinds of disputes that divide the nation. In the 19th Century those divides were in part sectional, but also very much cultural. Now? Clearly there are cultural dimensions, but they are of economic interests, of political interests.
Perhaps we will not see states take up arms one group against the rest, although a man considering running for President, Gov. Perry, has at least alluded to the possibility of Secession, perhaps deliberating forgetting or ignoring that Secession was the precipitate cause of the conflict in the middle of the 19th Century that defined us as a nation.
Today is Memorial Day. Today, by tradition, we honor all those who served honorably, whether in War or in those times of peace this nation has occasionally known. We honor those who died in military service, and those who like Paul Wiedorfer returned to a civilian life. We honor those with decorations for valor and for their wounds, and we honor those who served quietly in positions that enabled those in combat to be supplied, trained, armed, transported, cared for medically.
Memorial Day should be an occasion of solemnity. Were one to go to a National Cemetery, such as that a few miles away from me in Arlington, one will see by every grave an American flag. We honor those whose service enables America to be free.
And that is appropriate. And I do not in any way diminish that.
I would hope that we could, perhaps somehow today as well, honor those whose service has at times avoided War, and thus the further death and destruction that can flow therefrom. Here I am again reminded of one who having served with distinction, was able with skill to avoid a potentially devastating nuclear exchange in October of 1962. Jack Kennedy, whose birthday was yesterday, did this nation more good in that than his notable service in the Navy, which of course he leveraged into a succession of positions of political power and leadership.
Some of this nation's most important statements about war come from the Civil War, the conflict that leads to this day's holiday - or perhaps we should phrase it as Holy Day.
Lincoln of course offered his words at a kind of Memorial Day, at Gettysburg, in November of 1863.
Sherman told us War is Hell.
And Bobby Lee, looking at the slaughter of Union troops as they were beaten back from the assault on Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, opined
It is well that war is so terrible — lest we should grow too fond of it.
let we should grow too fond of it As we remember those who served, especially those who served in combat sometimes giving up their lives and their bodies, we should also remember the cost of war, the prices paid by families of those whose bodies and souls are shattered, and by the soul of the nation that commits them to such sacrifice.
We should honor. I do not dispute that. We should remember that service. It should be with solemnity, like the rows upon rows of flags at our national cemeteries, or of the reading of names at various memorials around the nation.
But should not we also remember words like those of Lee, like those of Paul Wiedorfer?
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Medal of Honor didn’t exist because there were no wars and we could all live in peace?’’
And now, only now, is my final salutation appropriate.
Peace.