Memorial Day

“If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin…
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.”*

 – Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, killed in action 1 week before the end of WWI

* "Sweet and becoming it is to die for one's country"

I had a dream one night that I had somehow ended up in the army, and was debating with my fellow soldiers whether I ought to carry a gun. I argued that it would be morally right to protect them by stopping a bullet with my body, if necessary, but not by killing a fellow human being. They responded, “Yes, but who will protect us from the next hundred bullets?” In my dream, I then picked up the gun.

For a long time now, I’ve been uneasy about Memorial Day. It feels like this holiday is the day we all officially admit that we, as a nation and as a species, have given up.

We’ve given up on the possibility that we will ever live without war. We’ve just shrugged and accepted that whenever two tribes have a conflict, “Wholesale Slaughter” will be the go-to option. We’ve just accepted that if we don’t launch the first strike, the other side will, so we’d better get our self-defense in first and hope we strike hard enough that the other side won’t be alive to strike back. If we have any doubts, someone shouts "Nine-Eleven!" (and someone on the other side names an equivalent atrocity perpetrated against them), and we all resign ourselves to having to continue.

We’ve accepted that we have always sent children to go kill and be killed by other children, and that we always will.

We who have never been in combat talk about remembering the dead with honor, because otherwise we would have to remember with shame that WE SENT THEM TO DIE.

We fill the day with barbecues and garage sales and parades if the weather’s nice enough, because we can’t bring ourselves to think about our collective responsibility, about their blood on our hands.

We don’t want to think about the harsh reality that despite the fact every sane, decent human being wants peace, it only takes one sociopath to set off a chain reaction that turns millions of sane, decent human beings into killers or murder victims.

We don’t want to think about how every time we say “Sure, WE don’t want to fight, but THEY started it”… someone on the other side is saying exactly the same thing about us.

We don’t want to think about how, once the fighting has started, as in my dream, we pick up the gun - knowing that it's wrong but unable to think of any other way to defend ourselves and our families and friends.

We don’t want to remember that those who come back from combat alive still had something within them die.

My grandfather, God rest his soul, was one of four men out of a 200-man company that survived a battle in the African desert during World War II. Grandpa told, many times, the story of how he crawled through the desert for three days to Allied lines, with a bullet wound in his chest. How he saw a vision of his long-dead mother telling him to carry on. How he stayed in the hospital long enough to be treated for his bullet wound and malaria, then went AGAIN to Sicily (where he could very well have been exchanging gunfire with family, since his father was an immigrant from southern Italy). He showed us the scars on his chest and back (exit wound bigger than entry wound, he’d pointed out, and also noted how it miraculously managed to strike the one spot in his chest that missed heart, lungs, and other vital organs). He showed us the medals, including his Purple Heart (awarded to soldiers wounded in combat). He told the story just about every time I saw him.

He never, for some reason, told anyone about the horseshoe. My mother and aunt found it in his belongings after he died, carefully wrapped up and labeled as the horseshoe with which he dug in to create cover and hide while he waited for Rommel’s troops to leave.

He never said whether he’d had to hide among the mangled corpses of his buddies.

He never got any counseling or support for PTSD. Probably never even knew that was the name for what he was experiencing.

He did sometimes say that he'd killed Germans with his bare hands.

He never, but never, but never, found the freedom to weep about the fact that as a teenager, HE HAD BEEN FORCED TO KILL OTHER TEENAGERS WITH HIS BARE HANDS IN ORDER TO SURVIVE.

He did spend a LOT of time at the VFW and the American Legion, trying to find silent affirmation from other people who knew what it was like but also didn't have the vocabulary to express the inexpressible wrongness of what they'd been through.

He did spend a LOT of time researching and writing about recipients of the Medal of Honor.

He did watch every movie and read every book he could about World War II, and try and get his children and grandchildren to do likewise.

He did show up at every soldier’s funeral that he could, and put flowers and flags on their graves every Memorial Day.

He did, the last time I saw him, when he could no longer speak and could barely move from Parkinsonian symptoms, point out a history book with a passage that referred to the battle in which he’d been wounded. My grandmother said “For God’s sake, Tony, would you stop talking about the war!” Grandpa’s face eloquently said, in a way words never could, “For God’s sake, Mary, don’t you think I would if I could?”

He did spend his whole life trying to process this horror, and never did seem to find a way to be at peace.

There can be no peace, for those who have lived first-hand through war.

 ALL soldiers are casualties of war.

And THIS… this is what we send our children into.

If we let ourselves truly remember on Memorial Day, we might never forget.

If we let ourselves truly remember, we might understand that we cannot fight for peace. We must do the much harder task of WORKING for peace. And we must do it continually.

If we let ourselves truly remember, we might take a hefty percentage of the money and resources that we currently pour into our military and spend them instead on addressing the things that cause war – poverty, famine, oppression, desperation, both at home and abroad.

If we let ourselves truly remember, we might stop telling the old lie, and begin to deal with the hard Truth.

© John M. Munzer