Memorial Day

"Mr. President, in our effort to accommodate many Americans by making the last Monday in May, Memorial Day, we have lost sight of the significance of this day to our nation. Instead of using Memorial Day as a time to honor and reflect on the sacrifices made by Americans in combat, many Americans use the day as a celebration of the beginning of summer. My bill would restore Memorial Day to May 30 and authorize our flag to fly at half mast on that day. In addition, this legislation would authorize the President to issue a proclamation designating Memorial Day and Veterans Day as days for prayer and ceremonies honoring American veterans. This legislation would help restore the recognition our veterans deserve for the sacrifices they have made on behalf of our nation." (1999 Congressional Record, page S621) 

                                                                             -- Senator Inouye, Hawaii

My first memories of Memorial Day are from a time when I was so much younger, when for many years my parents and I would visit a so very small plot of ground on a hill overlooking the Conemaugh River Valley.  My mother always brought along flowers to be planted.  My father wielded a spade, turning over the ground before a marble block, until a rectangle of turned sod was formed.  Carefully, the flowers were planted.

The block had my sister's name on it.  But, of one thing I was certain, whatever it was that lay in that ground was not my sister.  In many ways, to me, my sister was life itself, and it was I who had to climb the stairs and wake my parents that morning that she was so sick, sick enough that even the child that I was knew that I had to get one of them to come down to help her.  I had come to grips with "dead," when my father's stepfather died.  But, Nancy?  

I knew that something lay down in the earth below those flowers.  Each year's maturity and exposure to the concepts of dead and dead bodies had, I am sure, an effect on what I believed might lay below the ground.  But, that whatever it was that had made that thing my sister, I was sure was not there.

By the time I was in high school my parents no longer made me go with them, if they still went at all.

But by then Memorial Day had begun to present different "religious" symbologies:  One of barbeques, baseball, and the Indianapolis 500; the other one, more somber, of women wearing red poppies, of parents reliving tales of World War II, and of young men dying for a cause which had once seemed so clear to a high school generation before ours and which would only be remembered as vague pictures on the news by a high school generation once removed after ours.

I served in the United States Army for 3 years in the early 1970s.  My own military service was "interesting" and the use of the quotation marks is intended to emphasize the distance that irony put between the world in which that service obligation operated and the way that the rest of society -- at least as I had been exposed to it and imagined it -- operated.  I am blessed that I worked directly for the Colonel who was the V Corps Adjutant General, if for no other reason that, to this day, he periodically sends me e-mails to keep me informed of what he is doing and to take the time to remind me that he still remembers me and appreciates the job I did for him while working for him.  The irony even in that is not lost in me, because ... 

"Colonel Zahm?"

"Yes."

"I have to take about an hour this afternoon."

"Is anything wrong?"

"No, sir.  It is just that one of the requirements for my out-processing {me waving my paperwork at the Colonel as I spoke} is that it has to be signed off by the Recruitment office, and I checked with them and they told me they could see me this afternoon.  In fact, I am not sure if Sergeant McElhose or Captain Sonstein laughed louder at the thought of seeing me."

"Let me see that paperwork."

He was the Colonel.  He was the Corps AG.  I worked for him, not he for me.  The Recruitment office staff also reported directly to him.  I handed him my paperwork.

"Where is the part that has to be signed off by the Recruitment ..."

"Right there, sir."

"... office?"

He signed off as to my having met the requirement to hear the reenlistment talk, and as he handed me the paperwork, he said, "I love the Army, Specialist Kelley, and I really like you, too.  You were not made for the Army, and the Army was not made for you."

I knew I never fit in the military as a career soldier, and as the last of the drafted soldiers with whom I had been serving were leaving all around me, I felt it to be even more a reality.

Yet, for all the truth that the Army and I were not meant for each other, there have been few men in my life that I respected more than the two colonels with whom I worked so closely during my time at V Corps, Colonels Zahm and Cockill.  Over the years, I have known others who made the military their careers and those who have given their children to military service that gave back bodies that were not their children.  

At this age, the joyous family celebrations on the holidays often nowadays without thought of the those who gave their lives does not bother me as it did from time to time between then and now.  I have come to accept that, like most heroes, those who served and even those who died, did so never intending that what they did be remembered as anything other than doing their job.  

But, this Memorial Day weekend, I will  ...

... in the midst of the rejoicing in another day given to me by the Good Lord, I will also take time for sober reflection, even in the midst of celebration.

I will take time to listen to the Memorial Day Concert, and in doing so I will reflect on those who have served this country and given their lives.

At 3:00 p.m., wherever I am on Memorial Day, I will stop for the National Moment of Remembrance.

In addition, on this Memorial Day, I will set aside part of my daily prayer time to think pray specifically for the people who served from Concord to Afghanistan, for those who will answer the military's call tomorrow and in time to come, and, in a moment of purely personal remembrance, for my, now two, sisters whose bodies rest beneath a carpet of green grass.  I feel it an honor to give my time in reflection on them.

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For more on the Memorial Day Concert, see:   http://www.pbs.org/memorialdayconcert/
For more on the National Moment of Remembrance, see:  http://ngl.org/

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