May 28, 2023
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.
For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.
When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.
Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.
When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed "Wray's Ragged Irregulars" after their commander Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.
It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomb squadrons.
Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.
I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau's children weren't there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.
Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.
I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.
And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.
I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.
But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.
So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.
May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.
[Photo by Carole Green.]
In 1865, in remembrance of the 600,000 Union and Southern soldiers killed in the Civil War, Congress created the first Memorial Day.
Since then, our nation has found it necessary to "celebrate" an additional 161 Memorial Day as the number of Americans killed in foreign wars continues to grow. It could easily be named "National Mourning Day" as we have exceeded 1,400,000 US soldiers who have died in combat since that first Memorial Day back in 1865. If this number doesn't get your attention, consider that it doesn't include the 90,000,000 civilians killed worldwide in WWI & WWII alone. That's a lot of men, women, and children who, just like you and me, wanted to live and enjoy their lives.
By now, you might think Americans would have had enough of this daily killing-off of our greatest national treasure, our children. But no, even with the current horrific daily carnage to fellow citizens and the forgotten lessons of prior foreign misadventures, we have continued sending our offspring off to fight in the 37+ wars we've fought since the end of WWII.
How does one explain that? Maybe we are just plain stupid. Or more sadly, perhaps we love war too much to quit because incredibly we are still at it.
Since it began with our "search" for WMDs and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have buried another 7000 uniformed American men and women, and have added to our burdened Nation, the daunting task of rehabilitating the other 44,000 wounded soldiers that are now home. These numbers don't include the over 3,000 civilian contractors that were also killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With thousands of US soldiers already killed and wounded in these two dustbowl countries, research compiled by the Costs of War Project at Brown University found an estimated 30,177 active duty personnel and veterans who have served in the military since 9/11, have died by suicide. This is compared with 7,057 killed in post 9/11 military operations.
Add in some $4 Trillion of our treasury spent; it's difficult for me to understand why we are not back in the streets protesting this crazy senseless waste of human talent and national resources.
At closing in on 81 years old and a former US Army infantryman, I still remember the protests and civil unrest the Vietnam War generated that ultimately changed the White House. But where are the people with the slogans and chants of protest today?
In Atkinson's book on the war in Western Europe, The Guns of Last Light, he tells of Patricia O'Malley, who was a year old when her father, Major Richard James O'Malley, a battalion commander in the 12th Infantry, was killed by a sniper in Normandy. She later wrote of seeing his headstone for the first time in the cemetery at Colleville, above Omaha Beach. "I cried for the joy of being there and the sadness of my father's death. I cried for all the times I needed a father and never had one. I cried for all the words I had wanted to say and wanted to hear but had not. I cried and cried.”
How many new tears will be shed by America's mothers, fathers, widows, and parentless children in the years ahead before we tell Congress that we've "shed all the tears we ever want to shed?"
Stephen Kyle
I've got a lump in my throat after reading how people went to Beau's grave and sent you photos of his cross. How lovely that they helped you realize that his memory lives on.