Memorial Day is the day that we remember the soldiers who never got a chance to be Veterans. These are the men and women who died in service to our country.
This is always a sad, thoughtful day for me. Living in Mississippi, I am surrounded by the horrible evidence of the human cost of the Civil War. There isn't a small town around in my neck of the woods that doesn't have a confederate cemetery. In fact, the nearby town of Columbus—a beautiful little place that managed to be one of the few in Mississippi to survive the war without being burned to the ground—is one of the couple of towns in the US that started remembering war dead from both sides of the Civil War: the first Memorial Day. It was originally called "Decoration Day" in Columbus, and the story of the local women decorating graves with flowers from their gardens was said to have inspired Francis Miles Finch to write his famous poem "The Blue and the Gray."
Finch captures the real human tragedy that Memorial Day was established to remember. One stanza reads:
These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgement-day
Under the laurel, the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray.
It is death in war and its tragic loss that characterizes the real nature of Memorial Day. The rest of this diary is an argument about why we all should remember it.
Beyond Finch's poem, there are two other thing I try to look at every Memorial Day. The first is Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife Sarah written a week before he died on the battlefield of First Bull Run in 1861. What is so compelling about this letter and others like them is how these soldiers deal with the acceptance of the death all around them, and the very real possibility of their own.
July 14, 1861
Camp Clark, Washington
My very dear Sarah:
The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more . . .
Sullivan talks briefly about what may lay ahead for his regiment, and then writes perhaps one of the most beautiful things ever written about being taken away from the person you love:
But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night—amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours—always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Human loss is the epic tragedy that Memorial Day remembers. The loss of husbands ripped from wives, mothers from children, sons and daughters taken from parents.
For me, it is impossible not to consider the reason for this human loss on Memorial Day. As much as we have the capacity to fight bravely for what we consider necessary, the truth of war is often not as clear nor as honorable. Death in war compels us to consider the act of war itself, its horror, and the ultimate failure of human agency it represents.
And this is the profound difference between Veteran's Day and Memorial Day; to remember the failure of war is to make sure we don't seduce ourselves with its heroism. Remembering death, we are less likely to wrap ourselves in our flags and forget the very real cost of war.
So, the last thing I do on Memorial Day is dig up James Garner's famous antiwar speech in the 1964 film "The Americanization of Emily." Garner's character, Charlie Madison, is a war hero who finds himself to be completely cynical about the nature of war and its cost, and makes one of the most startling speeches about the real truth of war ever filmed:
Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison: We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.
A proper remembering of our war dead on Memorial Day should always lead us to Charlie's conclusion: unless we face death as a consequence of war, we will always make more of it.
Over the past couple of decades, the decades of our endless wars on terror, there has been a slow but rather conscious attempt to conflate Veteran's Day with Memorial Day. Charlie, I think, tells us why; when we face the living evidence of our wars, our veterans, it is next to impossible to think about the context of war itself. How could we look at the men and women who have gone to battle for our nation and doubt the cause that put them there? How could we look at their injuries, the costs to themselves and their families, and not give them the honor and praise they deserve? The truth is, we cannot, because it is impossible not to empathize with our veterans as human beings. Cynically, there are forces in our lives that use this human empathy that we have for our veterans to get what they want out of our country's military strength. On the corporatist side, there is the pervasive painting of every capitalist enterprise with the face of veterans. On the much more serious side, there are those armchair neocons without any sense of human dignity who would make sure we don't start questioning their fantasies of American Empire.
Veteran's Day is a day of empathy and understanding. Memorial Day is a day of remembrance, reflection, and—ultimately I think—an argument for peace. Those of us who want peace in our time should see that Memorial Day remains what it originally was meant to be: the day to remember that death is the very foundation of war.
Today is Memorial Day. Peace to all.
UPDATE: Thanks to Regina in a Sears Kit House for the Community Spotlight spotlight!