Another Memorial Day is upon us. The politicians will make their speeches, many of them quite moving. The cemeteries will be mowed and fresh flowers will be placed on some of the graves. American flags will be flying everywhere, some at half-mast on tall poles, some floating silently in a soft breeze in front of residential homes where the pain is still deeply felt.
The Indy 500 will be run. Hard-working people everywhere will make plans to get out of town. Barbecues will be fired up and young boys and girls will go camping and swimming. The weather will be sunny and warm and everyone I talk to will have had a great 3-day weekend. Thankfully, I guess, life belongs to the living, and the world never skips a beat.
It wasn’t all that many years ago that I absolutely hated Memorial Day. I thought of it as nothing more than another societal celebration of war, dedicated to reinforcing much of the garbage we see in movies, or read about in books. I was convinced that if civilized man was ever going to get rid of war, then the very first thing we all needed to do was stop glorifying it, especially the dying part. We needed to all understand that war is nothing more than mankind’s greatest shame.
As time moved on, though, I came to understand that the real reason almost every new generation goes off to fight in some war far away from home is because many people, men in particular, actually like it. By that I mean that for many men throughout the centuries, starting a war or going off to fight in one was the biggest adventure of their entire lives. They got to travel to distant places they would have never seen otherwise; prove (or fail to prove) to themselves and others that they were indeed men; and also meet all kinds of interesting and exotic people (especially of the opposite sex) who would have never popped up in their real lives. They don’t call it the spoils of war for nothing.
But after I came to the reluctant conclusion that mankind will keep having wars because a whole lot of people enjoy them (not to mention that they have also been historically great for business and very effective at keeping the world’s population from exploding), I started looking at Memorial Day in a totally new light. I turned my attention away from the politicians and the profiteers and the tellers of exaggerated war stories, and towards the chiseled cold, hard marble which simply reads, “All gave some, some gave all.”
More specifically, I turned my attention and deep respect to Sgt. James R. Woods, KIA 11Aug69. Woody loved good music and quiet conversation and he had taken his R&R in Hawaii so he could be with his fiancée, a very pretty girl he could never stop talking about; WO1 Henry J. Vad, KIA 6Nov69. He had a thick New York City accent, was courageous to a fault, and everyone was in awe of the incredible things he could make a helicopter do. And although he was always flying at tree-top level, it was unthinkable that a single shot from an AK-47 rifle on the ground could actually bring him down; PFC Michael H. Lawhon, KIA 11Aug69. He was kind and gentle and brand new to the platoon. He could hardly wait to get his year in Vietnam over with so he could go back to his beloved family in Indiana; SP4 August F. Hamilton, KIA 29Jul69. He was only four days younger than me and he was a veteran who always looked and acted like one; Sgt Allen H. Caldwell, KIA 17Nov69. He was a giant of a man who liked to joke about how his huge frame made him much too good of a target; SSG James R. Potter, KIA 11Sep69. He was only 22 years old and already a much-liked and respected staff sergeant; SP5 James L. Downing, KIA 6Nov69. His courage and ability with an M-50 machine gun were of no help to him when the helicopter he was door gunning in crashed to the earth; SP4 Eric T. Harshberger, KIA 1Nov69. He had been in Vietnam for almost a year and was so close to going home; PFC William J. Brown, KIA 17Nov69. He was only 19 years old and walking the dangerous point position, as all the new guys had to do, when he lost his life; and Kit Carson Scout Chin Nguyen, KIA 7Sept69. His smile was wonderfully contagious and he was absolutely determined to live free, like all men did in America, a country that he believed only went to war for the right reasons, and never lost.
Ten tiny grains of sand on the terrible beach of war — real people, not statistics — and each of them would have given anything, absolutely anything, to be alive on this year’s Memorial Day.