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.
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?"
Mr. Kyle, such a poignant post -- thank you, sir. I had the chance to visit the American Normandy Cemetery at Colleville last year with my grandson, who was 13 at the time. To view all of those headstones, in perfect peaceful rows, was so deeply moving that I was in tears the whole time, imagining lives left unfulfilled, and their grieving loved ones. As the song "Where Have all the Flowers Gone" asks, "When will we ever learn?" And thank you, Heather, for sharing Beau's story.
My spouse and I were at Colleville, in 2017 as part of a trip we took to celebrate 50 years of marriage. Being there leaves an impact that I will always feel. Before retirement I worked in a job with a great deal of international travel so crossing the ocean was no big deal, it was just something I did as much as I hated the insides of airplanes. Being at Normandy and seeing that cemetery made me realize that the families of many of those buried there never had the money to visit. I knew no one buried there but after being there I knew all of them and remember their families this day.
Seeing the photos at the museum of some of those killed during the D-Day assault, along with bios of their brief lives cut short, really brought it home for me. Their bravery remains unimaginable to me -- whether emerging from the landing craft at Omaha, or ascending the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, or jumping out of aircraft. The sheer terror of it all.
Thank you, Mr. Kyle for this powerful and poignant essay. I wish we had an alternative icon to "Like"--one that represents that we "like" your views, but hate the misery of the topic. Those of us who were born into the echoing shadows of the Nuremberg Trials, the blustering venom of Joe McCarthy, the Kefauver Hearings, the Korean non-war, and inspired by the moral compasses of strong, brave, white-hatted good guys on our new 12-inch round screened televisions, protected from the scourge of polio but always on the alert for atom bomb warnings, were galvanized into activism by our own Baby-Boomer moral compass. Brought up in and protected by the relative comfort of the booming 1950s, we got us out of Vietnam, we gained (losing them now) rights for women, we fought against racism--Civil Rights Acts, massive marches, Dr. King--and our music ("Something's Happening' Here . . ." "War, What Is It Good For?", "What's Goin' On?","Fortunate Son.") We provided the US with a conscience and the collective actions that were mandated by that conscience. And we're still out here, with our gray hair--or bald heads, sciatica, stenosis, cataracts, and arthritis, just keepin' on keepin' on, and to paraphrase Marvin , "there's still too many of us dying." Subsequent generations have not experienced this crucible, have no unifying music, are distracted/adrenalized by social media, were not allowed to learn critical thinking skills in their standardized-test-based classrooms, have been sheltered by helicopter parents, and thus lack the focus, skills, and drive to fight for human rights. It feels like we're on "The Eve of Destruction," and without HCR, the answers we need would be, "Blowin' in the Wind."
I play a CD from the PBS set of 60's folk music most evenings while doing a jigsaw puzzle, and remember. Yes, we provided a conscience and collective actions. We still do. We still must.
The pull of our music . . . the soundtrack of our fight . . . for the 20 years that I taught 10th grade English, I augmented the mandatory, "All Quiet on the Western Front" Unit by showing how "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Many of my students had older siblings who were in the military during the Iraq and Afghanistan actions, and I'd developed a project for them featuring Vietnam. My 185 kids each--except for one-- adopted a disabled vet from the Palo Alto and Menlo Park, CA VA medical facilities. One student blew the assignment because despite our readings and discussions, she thought she was supposed to interview a veterinarian. Anyway, 5 times a day for 1 week during those years, I showed the unforgettable, searing documentary, "Dear America: Letters from Vietnam." To my students' delight, I lip-synched the entire soundtrack. This extraordinary documentary is based on the equally extraordinary book, "Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam," edited by Bernard Edelman. Both are heart- wrenching and provide innumerable occasions for very solemn personal and political reflection--perfect for this and every Memorial Day weekend. https://www.vietnamveteransplaza.com/book-film/dear-america-letters-home-from-vietnam-film/
From one active duty military service veteran to you, a teacher: I consider you to have served our country as well as I had ever hoped to. Thank you for your service on this Memorial Day.
I'll always remember that, when I was a young child, my early-30s year-old parents used to have several friendly neighborhood high schoolers over, and they'd sit around our kitchen table talking, spin 45s, and drink tea. As I was lying in bed one night, probably age 9 or 10, they talked about the Vietnam War which was escalating under LBJ. The boys were afraid to go, and I distinctly recall one of them saying that when I turned 18 the war would still be going on, and it would be my turn. I lay there frightened by the thought that this may come true.
I turned 18 in 1973, the year the draft lottery only selected one birthdate out of 365 to call into service -- fortunately for me, it was not mine. But it was someone's.
I had a handful of teachers from both elementary and high school who I remember very fondly for what they taught me and how they treated me. One of them, my fourth grade teacher, Saran Morgan Hutchins, gave me an everlasting fascination with Scandinavia, beginning with the Vikings, but extending to the Scandinavia of the present.
I also had a very interesting experience with her. My class with her was very small--12 kids. I read avidly. And at some point when I was in her class, I picked up a Scholastic Book Service book about Charles Lindbergh. I was ultimately spooked to read about the kidnapping of his child. As I remember it, the book was vague about that, and I asked my parents about it, and I think they told me he had been killed.
Decades later, I googled my teacher. Her mother was Lindbergh's wife's sister. I'm sure she knew I was reading the book. I would have been VERY upset had I known then that that child was her cousin (she was born a number of years after he was killed). The whole thing would have become personal. And so I'm grateful she didn't tell me. Among much else that I'm grateful to her for.
So your teacher was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s cousin? Another interesting person - Their father was a diplomat (ambassador to Mexico) and a US senator - NJ. she wrote Gift from the Sea.
Beautiful and heartbreaking, Joanne. I’m a part of that shrinking generation of “Boomers,” who are now being denigrated and mocked as selfish. Clearly those throwing around those insults are unaware of the seriousness and genuineness of our commitment to peace and love. How many Boomers do we know who dedicated their lives to the Peace Corps, volunteerism, starting and running nonprofits, civil rights, equality....? What % of young people today will follow in those footsteps? I can only pray that our youth are equally engaged, active and dedicated.
Speaking for my own children who spent much of their young lives at Vietnam protests, the answer is almost zero. Despite my providing an example I fully expected them to follow, as I followed my mother's, they are too wrapped up in their own lives to be participatory. Maybe life is just so much more complicated today, it doesn't leave time for outside commitments, and perhaps that's as the power structure intends?
Good points, Dotty. Maybe it skips a generation. My "Children of the Depression" parents weren't political activists--they were too busy working to stave off and protect us from the economic conditions they had suffered as children. My grandparents, on the other hand, were politically active back in the early 1900s in Vilna, and then in the US during the 1930s. My grandmother and I used to share stories of our protest activities--hers against the Czar, and mine against Vietnam, racism, and misogyny.
Thank you Marge, for your kind words. So frustrating to hear Gen X and Millennial women dismiss all we did to make their comfortable lives possible. The recent war on women's reproductive rights could have been prevented if these young women and their mothers had joined our fight to pass the ERA. I am, however, grateful for and impressed by my Gen Z Granddaughter and her friends who seem to have inherited our commitment to human rights.
Thank you Ms. Gilbert -- I wish I could write a tenth as well. You make a strong presentation of the power our baby boomer generation grasped to effect change, at least in the 60s and early 70s (I graduated high school in 1973.) It's a good reminder for me who is more apt to remember us boomers as responsible for disco, leisure suits, and eventually rampant consumerism leading to climate degradation. And much of the idealistic aspirational youth of the 60s and 70s are now red-hatted MAGA types. If only their teen-aged selves could see them now.
I disagree. I can't quote any research, but none of the people I marched with in the 60s are now MAGA.
In the days we were marching against the war there were hecklers along the way and I have no difficulty assuming they are MAGA today.
I refuse to believe that any of the thousands of us who were there for the First March on Washington against the Vietnam War in April of 1965 have devolved into supporters of the destruction of Democracy.
While we might have been born into the same families, 1st Wave Boomers have little in common with 2nd Wave Boomers. They are Boomers only for post-war birthrate analysis. They did not share our experiences.
Thanks for your kind words. One way to define, "Baby Boomer," in the aggregate is by birth years: 1946-1964, when the birthrate surged. Another way is more sociological, by recognizing that the childhoods between 1946 and 1954 ( 1st Wave or Early Baby Boomers) differed greatly from those between 1955 and 1964 2nd Wave or Jones's). While these two cohorts can be combined for post war birthrate purposes, their perceptions, experiences and zeitgeists were and are very different. For example, no one I ever knew as a teenager has turned into an Acultamurican. We are just as motivated and determined to be active for human rights as we always were. As the first kids born post-war to the returning GIs, newly liberated Holocaust Survivors, 1st generation to have TV, we were teenagers in the mid 60s. Our world was very different from our younger siblings, and we had a distinctly different experience than those of you who were teenagers in the 70s.
Thank you Ms. Gilbert -- your dissection of boomers confirms what I've long thought about our generation. And I bet you were an effective English teacher, one whose class I doubtless would have enjoyed attending. Please allow me to elaborate.
I never liked "grammar" in grade school or "English" in jr. high -- learning the rules bored me to death. (Spelling was the only part I did well in, as I was a very good speller.) Anyway, freshman English was equally dreadful, taught by Mrs. S. who, I later found out, was having personal issues. One day, she walked up and down each row of desks and told each student either "I like you" or "I don't like you". I was one of the "don't likes", and the feeling was mutual. Absolutely a true story. (Apologies for lengthy retelling of my experiences.)
Suffice it to say I failed frosh English and had to retake it in 10th grade, taught by Mr. M., who gave me an A and kept asking me how I could have failed it the 1st go-round. From that point on I loved English, and fondly remember my 10th grade teacher, Mrs. M. as well as my later ones.Teachers DO make a difference. (My daughter and youngest sister both teach elementary Ed, my brother teaches at college level, and my mom was meant to be a teacher, but life got in the way.) I'm sure your students remember you fondly, Ms. Gilbert.
Thanks so much, Mr. Gagne! I definitely was a subversive teacher--and often in trouble with the administrators! I also issues with grammar. Never could diagram a sentence, so I refused to teach it. Still don't know what the purpose was. Also refused to teach semi-colons. I've stayed in touch with many of my former students and am grateful for their friendship.
The time of the later 60's early 70's many were anti-war actively, organized in marches. Many also went back to the land, to grow food and eat organically, compost the soil... and live together in communities. There were "Be-in's" and "Love-in's". This was a time that Yoga and Transcendental mediation became popular along with mind-expanding drugs like LSD. Books were written, art was made, and the music was extraordinary at times. Some folks went on to finish college and attain higher degrees dedicating their lives to doing good work. Many stopped preaching about love and no more war and turned inward realizing that living it personally was "where it was at". The more recent "Occupy Wall Street" movement was a reverberation/echo. At the same time that so many dropped out, many others did not. Those two strains came out of the 60's and 70's.
I share a lot of those Vietnam-era events with you. As a p.s. to those times, I thought to add my own experience and perception of the period. Opposition to the war seemed a bit slow in building nationally. As a sophomore (at Indiana University Bloomington) in April 1966, I saw the first and only anti-war demonstration I knew of. There was a counter-demonstration at the same time. They were orderly, mostly quiet marches, and even light-hearted as students slightly badgered each other. From then on, opposition began to slowly grow. I didn't hear MLK or RFK speak out against the war until 1968.
By then, more people were speaking out about the draft. The draft is where we began to be aware of economic class differences. Most of us middle-class and poor kids accepted that we would be subject to the draft as our fathers had been in WWII. Not that we accepted the growing war, but we did accept a commitment to service. I noticed that the affluent parents were more active in helping their teenage sons avoid the draft and military service (e.g., hiring expensive psychiatrists to buy an exemption for "Jimmy" or having their sons dress up in women's clothing and play gay or whatever other ruse). Later, there were others who just said, "I'm not going into service." I admired David Harris (Joan Baez's husband) for taking that principled stand, and he did about a year in jail for that as I recall.
The most impressive anti-Vietnam War force I know of was General David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. He grew up on a small farm in Indiana and had solid, sensible, fair values. He served in WWII and was a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his service in the Pacific war. He had worked his way through the ranks to the top where he was appointed Commandant by President Eisenhower and then kept in that position by JFK who valued his counsel in multiple foreign policies. Gen. Shoup said the Vietnam War was wrong evem before the U.S. sent any troops there He said that it was exploitative of a small, poor nation, and he refused to send Marines to that war. That is amazing stuff--a Commandant refusing to send his troops into an illegal, immoral war. A month after JFK was assassinated, Gen. Shoup resigned from the Marine Corps (Dec. 1963. He was probably forced into it by LBJ who was bonded to the MIC by then. In 1966, Three years after resigning from the Marines, Gen. Shoup gave a speech at Pierce College saying, “I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.” This was a career military leader and recipient of the Medal of Honor saying this. Ike was very impressed by Shoup and probably learned a lot more about the MIC from Gen. Shoup. General David Shoup should be acknowledged in all American history books. I'll remember him again this Memorial Day.
And some of us after 70 years of anti war protests, precinct captaining, constant involvement in local and national activism and a very few wins like women getting to make procreation decisions for themselves, are just too discouraged by current events to do anything more. I was born during WWII which they promised would be the last one only to find us in Korea a few years later. The terror of the McCarthy years are being recreated but now the screens on which we're lied to are 60" wide and in living color and on 24/7. "When will it ever end, when will it ever end?"
And the MIC budget remains untouched as it continues to skyrocket, partly because of obscene costs imposed by subcontractors. The war machine makes many people very wealthy, alas.
The US "spends" 37% of the world's expenditures on "defense". Or put it this way, the US military industrial complex pockets more than the military budgets of the next seven largest budgets combined. "U.S. military spending dwarfs the budget of the #2 country – China. For every dollar China spends on its military, the U.S. spends $2.77."
When President Biden is re-elected and we take back Congress with strong majorities, one of our work list items should be an audit of the "Defense" budget. I suspect we could find a lot of fraud, redundancies, wastefulness and inefficiencies. And those billions could go a long way to paying our military personnel better, providing more post service assistance such as education, apprenticeships and job placement services.
We should also be offering better healthcare for Veterans and their families. A Vet can come home disabled or too traumatized to do the work he or she did before. There is a wide range of suffering that is more than the relatively recently accepted PTSD.
And too little is written about the impact of war on dependents and loved ones who are essentially abandoned by the money grubbing system that blew up their lives.
We could do all that good work for Veterans, feed our kids, educate our kids, eliminate homelessness and much more with a cleaned up "Defense" budget and proper taxes on the Oligarchs who have been milking the system for decades.
Bill You are right that our ‘defense budget’ is as porous as Swiss cheese. Some major construction projects (ships, planes, tanks) are extraordinarily over budget, years behind production schedules, and, too often, a bad product that doesn’t work.
If you send me your e-mail, I will send you my expansive review of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ book DUTY. SecDef under Bush and Obama, I consider Gates America’s best SecDef, with the possible exception of legendary General George C. Marshall.
Gates spells out in sickening detail how failing defense projects are not cancelled. Also, he underscores that, when the Pentagon seeks to end or curtail a flagging program, often Congressmen add massive $$$ to the budget to keep production rolling at a congressional district factory.
My impression is that no one knows where ‘all the bodies are buried’ in the defense budget. Then, of course, there is the competition between Navy, Army, Air Force (and ‘Space Command’) for bucks.
As Gates discovered, the Pentagon was skilled in planning for war but was ill equipped to actually fighting a war. He provided numerous examples of how he personally intervened to obtain timely support for soldiers in the field.
There is also as publication [Taxpayers for Common Sense?) that provides stomach-churning examples of defense wastage.
[Gates has been chair of an organization where I have been a long-time trustee. Face-to-face, he is just as impressive as the author of DUTY.]
"Perhaps no one understands the problem better than Shay Assad, now retired after four decades negotiating weapons deals. In the 1990s, he was executive vice president and chief contract negotiator for defense giant Raytheon. Then he switched sides… under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Assad rose to be the Defense Department's most senior and awarded contract negotiator. The Pentagon, he told us, overpays for almost everything – for radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.
Shay Assad: This, Bill, is an oil pressure switch that NASA used to buy. Well, ***their oil switch cost with all of the cabling cost $328. This oil switch we paid over $10,000 for it.*** [emphasis added]
Bill Whitaker: So what accounts for that huge difference?
Shay Assad: Gouging. What-- what else can account for it?"
How utterly outrageous is that?? And that's just one part/component of goodness knows how many.
"Gates spells out in sickening detail how failing defense projects are not cancelled. Also, he underscores that, when the Pentagon seeks to end or curtail a flagging program, often Congressmen add massive $$$ to the budget to keep production rolling at a congressional district factory."
And this practice of continuing and adding onto defense projects even when they are failing and wasting money has amazing and long term effects.
Clear back in the 1960s the States of Washington and California derived more than 50% of their economies from Military Industrial Complex companies and military bases. Oregon derived 3% of its economy from MIC sources. The only military bases that survived in Oregon were Coast Guard. Oregon also had anti war Senators and Representatives...probably not a coincidence.
To this day Oregon's economy is much smaller than Washington's or California's. Oh, yes, there are myriad other differences and Oregon is incredibly lucky to have been left behind in this race to insanity... I thank Godde every day for Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield.
The point is that getting on the MIC gravy train influences all kinds of obscure parts of life for people who live anywhere near the bases and/or the factories.
There is an an excellent non-profit organization that does an excellent job of exposing government waste in military contracting: The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is a nonpartisan independent watchdog that investigates and exposes waste, corruption, abuse of power, ... See POGO.Org.
Bill, I totally agree. Eisenhower was correct to warn us about the military-industrial complex but lobbyists win out in DC. It’s shameful that we are witnessing tent cities again; women who must travel up to 900 miles to choose an abortion (and wonder if they will be criminalized when they return home); the militarization of police who seem to feel entitled to execute at will any Black man.... and the endless wars. If I were younger, I’d be looking at Canada - fleeing my country as did young men facing the draft into an immoral war.
All of this expenditure for the US military-industrial complex. Add to that the US is far and away number one in the amount of guns among the general population. Coincidence?
But we are no longer teetering on the precipice of default, and that is huge. One day the defense budget and subcontractor charges will be investigated and brought under some kind of control. One day.
Ann W: We are still teetering. Postponing catastrophe without taking effective actions is a temporary fix. And since the Rs won't let us take effective action, this teetering becomes more dangerous.
read Rep Matt Rosendale's fb post & the comments of his followers urging him not to vote & let us default, I am not so certain we are still not teetering until it is past.
I hope you, too, like Ann W, are wrong, Carole. I cannot imagine what a historic U.S. default will do to the world. Let us imagine the best outcome and put those vibes out there, okay?
I know!!! However reading Rosendales fb post & the comments supporting his position on default in ignorance of what it means to EVERYONE , no matter how positive the vibes it is NOT getting to those who blindly follow those who are bent on destroying our democracy. How many others with representatives who are members of the freedom caucus are voting no
The bill representing the debt ceiling compromise still must pass the House—if McCarthy and Jeffries can corral enough members from their extreme wings—and the Senate, where opposing windbags like Rand Paul might choose to slow it down with endless “Look at ME” speeches. We are still teetering on the edge of catastrophic default.
Brenda Phillips, we may need the additional for Ukraine. I wish it were to get rid of military “contractors,” who I fear rip US off as a matter of course.
Defense spending is sold to the American public as "jobs," and that is certainly true. Nearly every congressional district has a major defense contractor -- mine is Boeing Helicopters, builders of the Osprey -- and those contractors are usually the largest employers in that district, employing thousands at very good salaries and employing many skilled workers, engineers, mechanics, fabricators, designers and so on. Where else would they get such good jobs? This is the bulk of manufacturing in America outside of the auto industry.
I join in thanking you Mr. Kyle, for your noble thoughts and reminiscences on this Memorial Day. Forgive me as I write in stream of consciousness style.
For over a decade from the late '80s through the early aughts, I played recreation league softball with a gaggle of friends, in parks throughout Los Angeles. Toward the end of that period, we were playing in a park in West Los Angeles, where an older man (I was in my early forties then, and am 62 now) named Lou would walk through the park on Sunday morning, and sit in the bleachers and root us on as we played. He was a longtime resident of the neighborhood, and hoisted beers with us after our games. After one game day a day before Memorial Day, he and I found ourselves on adjacent stools with the NBA playoffs on the tv above us adding to the usual happy din of raised voices and hearty razzing. When I mentioned the holiday the next day, he smiled, said something anodyne, and then went uncharacteristically silent. I took a beat, then asked him what was wrong. Then, this kind man looked off in a distance only he could see, and started to cry. He commenced to tell me of his service in England on the verge of D Day, with a squadron of men knowing only that they would be part of the Normandy invasion, while not knowing exactly when and where on the beach. That day like every day I saw Lou, a St. Louis native, he was wearing his bright red Cardinals cap. He told me of a friend of his that he grew up with who had joined the service with him, who was assigned to another squadron, and who had been shipped out from the training area, wrapped in secrecy, in the dead of night to reconnoiter on the English channel. He learned the next day that the craft that squadron had employed, had been sighted by the German U boat defenses, attacked, and sunk. Nobody had survived. Because the invasion remained imminent, and the Allies had sought to deceive the Germans as to where it would take place, none of the families were notified at the time. All of the remaining soldiers/sailors/airmen poised to invade were sworn to silence.
This gray haired, spritely retiree was 18 years old in 1944, half a world away from home, the same town where he and his friend grew up, and would neither see his friend ever again, nor be able to discuss what happened to him with his family. He sat on an imitation leather bar stool next to me, and with a face wracked with emotion and thoughts of the friend he lost so swiftly and so harshly, he returned to that terrible night of his youth, and sobbed. I said nothing, bought him another Budweiser, and left my hand on his shoulder until he gradually came back to the present.
The burden that these men and women carry with them as survivors, and the heavily redolent memories they have of the fallen are so overwhelming as to be unbearable.
May God bless and comfort them all, and may someday, someday, the white dove finally sleep in the sand.
In June 1943 he (1) graduated high school; (2) turned 19; and (3) was drafted. After basic he trained in England but his group wasn’t ready on D Day. He crossed later. Patton’s Third Army. He came home, restarted his life and got married. He answered my questions when I asked them but not until after he died did I more fully trace his steps. He was my hero, in so many ways.
My dad was also in Patton’s 3rd army (I think) because he never spoke of the war. I knew from mom that he was in the Battle of the Bulge and she said the he was never the same when he returned. They married in 1943 and had 7 children. When mom died after 51 years of marriage, I asked him what the war was like. He only said that it was the coldest winter on record and it was over 60 days before he saw the inside of a building. My mom had 3 brothers in the war and lost lost her brother Albert in Italy. She said of the war that everybody lost someone. When I think of all the hardships that we go through, still nothing compares to the time of the Great Depression and Hitler’s rise and WWII.
He shared a memory of friends and people lost which so many of us carry. What could of been will never be for them. A strange twist of fate made him the carrier of that memory and a shared message rarely discussed in public.
Kyle: thank you so very much for your well written and well researched essay! We all have many memories of grief and loss. I won’t share mine but your essay brought it all back and while I grieve as I write this, it is important (at least for me and I suspect for others who are reading this) that we remember, cry, and appreciate the relationship that while ended in life never ends until we ourselves die. But then others will grieve for us and the rhythm of life and death continues forever, doesn’t it? Thank you for bringing that back for me and undoubtedly for all who read your essay.
It seems our desire for violence and war has turned inward and the number of lives lost to mass shootings continues to mount with ever more restrictions on guns loosened and hateful speech applauded on radical media that used to have some baseline of decency.
Linda, I often shake my head trying to understand how it is that the supposedly most evolved and intelligent species on this planet is also the most violent and the most prone to killing for no other reason than CONTROL. My theory is that it begins with potty training and then spirals to unimaginable heights. And now it is personal since we have the guns to move it along even faster.
Gina, unfortunately and sadly, it’s more than “CONTROL” - but that’s a subject [mass killings, random violence, easy availability and access to weapons intended for warfare, misinterpretation of the intent of the second amendment, etc., et al] that will require the work of several blue ribbon panels, committees, along with graduate and post-graduate level courses and a responsible and honorable president along with an equally or superiorly responsible and honorable Congress to review and implement responsible legislation and laws for us to abide by!!!
Gina-Here's a response I hadn't thought of until I read your comment. It startled me.
"how it is that the supposedly most evolved and intelligent species on this planet is also the most violent" is self-explanatory in the sense that humans are more chimp-like than bonobo-related. What I mean is that wherever humans evolved, there is a record of conflict and strife. Who were/are the problem-solvers? Why, those who can see through the fog, step outside the box, and find new ways to win.
The best minds in physics, all of them genii, developed the atomic bomb of all things. The most violent possible invention in our history. Because it was used on an enemy of ours at the time, we really had no choice but to accept the results, and protesters were castigated as "unAmerican. Violence , resting quietly in our amygdalas, only needs a waker upper to spring into action as an emotion justified by a rationale later. Everybody has this part of the brain, it is the reptilian heritage. We carry the primitive history of our species, not always to a beneficial result.
Because the evolution you refer to is the dressing on our reptilian (emotionally driven) component, the various attempts to hogtie our emotions so we can work together as a community. But what we cannot do is completely excise the part of us that responds to threat. Our survival depends on it. The problem is what we are led to believe, (think about that phrase, led to, a messenger convinces us) isn't always a true threat, but a manufactured one for control. I remember watching the hearings before Bush's war on Iraq took place; I was in a coffee shop with several older men, most of whom were sceptical of the arguments, pointedly the Colin Powell justifications. Everyone I was with remarked that he didn't come across as sincere, that he didn't believe his own script. But what the hell, we didn't like those (choose your own disparaging insult), and Bush must know more than we did.
During the history of the U.S., since 1776, we have NOT been at war for 16 whole years. And yes, I have relatives who gave their lives in the name of Peace.
I could describe the time I rode with 3000 other bikers, mostly VN veterans, escorting the VN Moving Wall from the community college in Binghamton NY to the NYS state Fairgrounds in Syracuse. We had the left lane of I 81, stretched for 42 miles according to the State Police. Flags were flying at every overpass, held aloft by fire dept ladder trucks, an old man stood on top of his truck camper saluting the procession, our average speed was nearly 60, noise, grimmest faces I ever saw, wind, rain, sun, more wind gusts. POW MIA flags flew on most Harleys, the signature ride of that brotherhood. If you were there and not shaken to your core, you (the general you) have no concept of what these vets went through. War is Hell, and then some.
Ed - "'𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘷𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵' is self-explanatory in the sense that humans are more chimp-like than bonobo-related. What I mean is that wherever humans evolved, there is a record of conflict and strife."
Observing the social dynamics and power struggles of chimpanzees -- our closest genetic relatives -- offers illuminating insights into human behavior.
Gina, may I suggest reading The Dawn of Everything? It was an eye-opener for me. There was a time in human development when we were not so militant. There were societies that gave "us" models for community living and democratic consensus. They are not defunct, but it is more like "the squeaky wheel that gets the grease," that has become the norm.
The answer is to be vigilant against authoritarianism and suppression...and I think we are. Authoritarians rely on the cover of secrecy, wealth, and power. May we always speak truth to authority and do what many are doing...shine a light on them.
As the ruses, money, and Machiavellian evil of the Trumps, Putins, oligarchs, et al are exposed—and they are more and more— good will prevail. But good is always in need of our untiring support.
I agree that we must be vigilant and most of all NEVER give up. But sometimes we get so frustrated at the need to push through any feelings of defeat or backward movement which is what it amounts to with the forces pushing us in the wrong direction.
It will be up to the youth to carry that torch forward and I think they are up to it from what I see. They can certainly see that they have the work cut out for them since my generation won't be around for much longer.
Gina, I don't know what I would do if it weren't for Substacks such as LFAA. The country and the world are so pulled apart by oligarchs, greed, and misinformation. I rely on these letters for truth, sensibility and—more and more—companionship.
Mike, rats get a bad rap but they are quite resourceful and creative in their ability to survive. So yes, maybe we are more closely related to them. I guess in time we will find out.
Auschwitz survivors, the leading citizens of Vilnius, they lost over 90 relatives each in the fascist conflict that destroyed Europe and the Baltic states now worried about Russia, again.
Oh Europe, Jewish, of course, or different, there were 6 million, the “Never Again” generation now experiencing never in the USA anew, Jews will not replace us, chanted by white US fascists sporting swastika tattoos, waving the Confederate flag - the haters of January 6th, think of Dachau and Buchenwald, it’s all of a piece. Some complained, others died silently. They walked to the gas chambers. It did not matter.. Germans voted Hitler, then were not to vote or speak, only to obey, libraries closed to truth. Caring was outlawed.
Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma, South or North Carolina, Michigan or Nebraska, Montana or Wyoming, .. it doesn’t matter. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and the living ’ is Easy c
Stephen, you really got me when I read the numbers of soldiers who have died by suicide. Seeing that in black and white took me aback. I honor my father, a WWII Army veteran and a Holocaust victim. I also honor my husband, a Vietnam veteran (1968-1969) in the Army. My dad was in Papua New Guinea for four years. My husband was stationed out of My Tho for 1 year too long. War is hell.
The 1.4 million American service men and women dead in wars brings to mind the 1.4 million or so dead and continuing to die of covid19. And, how that has been ignored by those who claimed this was natural, that it interfered with their way of life by asking them to proactively prevent spread, or that all the protections and disease was a political and medical hoax.
Both in war and life, we make individual and community decisions that risk life and death. Mistakes were made in every war. In some cases, we acted too late allowing evil people to spread their misinformation and verbal violence against others until this erupted into war. Often the aggressors feel they can take what they want with no consequences or resistance. At other times, we became the aggressors by allowing the frenzy of fear to drive us into unwarranted conflicts like the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
I grew up on WWII stories from my parents’ generation who returned. As well as the history books that displayed every battle. And early TV programs like “You Were There” showing actual film of WWII battles and destruction. It was not meant to be entertaining. It was meant to be a warning to all of us to watch out for people like Hitler and those who foolishly followed him into Hell.
We, close to your 81, share a view which was influenced by the reported truths of the Vietnam era. WWII and Korea also filled our youthful knowledge of wars with truths as well. The loss of family and the return of those, both damaged and victor, spoke of a powerful need to avoid war. Yet, we believed from that era of truth all around us, the stained webbing at the war surplus market and later a need to build fallout shelters, that we must win all future war.
Today we have less certain truths, having been led into less certain wars, and voices such as yours offer an important spanning of that history.
Excellent post, Stephen Kyle. You remark how the war protests for Vietnam have not repeated. This was the first war (and only) that came through our television sets, deeply shocking Americans. Since then the camera coverage of wars has been limited. It is not permitted to film boxes of returning soldiers’ bodies being unloaded from planes. Yes, the government learned a lot from Vietnam, sanitizing the potent reality we at home see if the ongoing horror of our endless wars.
I’ve been protesting, resisting, and writing about the consequences of war since I became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. I wrote the Resistance Trilogy as a gift to generations that followed — to express how exciting, terrifying, ingenious, dangerous, hilarious, serious, and sexy the resistance movements of the sixties really were. So from Jane @bookandbeveragereview
We're close to the same age -- 78 here. Involved in any anti-war demo I could find and still relentlessly calling for a full transparent audit of the Department of Offense. Afghanistan, Iraq, and southern Syria and items in a history book -- but with no war, no imminent or even likely threat, Offense still gets a trillion. Yes, they say 900 billion but Offense squirrels away enormous amounts of their budget in Education, Interior, Energy, Transportation, Commerce, Labor, -- probably all of them. Kyle, that's what the 1% invests in -- the flood of military purchases. Billions of money to those in the stock-market \-know. And that's why the Offense just gets larger and larger and larger. . . .
Stephen Kyle -- "National Mourning Day" is a much more apt label for this day. Instead it seems to have generally become a celebration, a time for barbeques and parties, a day off from drudge. Thank you.
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.
Emotional intelligence. A quality of maturity and compassion it seems the current crop of the people who are supposed to be doing the work to keep our democracy in order are completely devoid of.
When standardized testing supplanted actual education, students were deprived of the opportunity to develop maturity and compassion. Critical thinking skills do not comport with multiple choice tests.
I agree. I think standardized testing may reveal something useful, but it is a narrow and limited tool, hardly a measure of human nature and potential that none of us fully understands in any case. We could teach kids to be observant, aware, and empathetic, and to question everything ; but we would have to be willing to put up with the amount of work that would be to manage and unsure of where it would take us. I think it would be well worth it.
Standardized tests don't really reveal anything useful except meaningless statistics for giving bureaucrats power over education. Those of us who were committed to and practiced the art and science of educating human beings before standardized testing, did a pretty good job of nourishing, cultivating, and inspiring informed, active, humanitarians.
And teaching them to be observant, aware, and empathetic, and to question everything would also require us to face our own history more objectively than a good portion of our political leaders have the intestinal fortitude to handle. On arrival in country, the latrine wall in Da Nang read "Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the baddest m********ker in the valley": the principle that is still operative and drives our unending love of war, its consequences be damned. There is just too much money to be made producing the weapons that we and our friends (and enemies) use in conducting war. Viet Nam's lessons were not learned by the leaders who took us into Iraq and Afghanistan: the profits to be made were just to much to resist.
Since no child left behind education has become a training program for teaching to the test. Texas gets their test from a UK company. Millions of dollars poured into another country for political purposes. I tell my students, it’s just one snapshot of your education and you are so much more than a score from that test!
It's a snapshot of students' ability to psych out a multiple choice test. It's a money-making industry in which kids and teachers are collateral damage.
Yes! Learning has been quantified like stock market quotes. We now operate out of the same “counting,” paradigm for everything. The “market” is all now. And to make sure it stays that way everyone needs to stay fearful and carrying their own AK47.
Harvard’s original and still common entrance requirements were family “standing”.
That is one reason John Adams had to sweat gaining entrance to Harvard unlike John Hancock.
Standardized testing was instituted, in substantial part, to introduce some kind of academic performance assessment.
But. Those assessments are still ignored at Ivy if your family standing is high enough or, like Jared Kushner, your Dad can donate $2 million bucks to Harvard.
So. Although I am a fan of looking at high school class rank instead of SAT because that is more highly correlated with college rank at graduation, I would still support ANY academic assessment at Harvard and Ivy.
Brava, Joanne Gilbert! Teachers have been hamstrung by “rules.” It’s why I never did an education course, but taught from memory of my best teachers. I could still teach, but there is nowhere that would allow it as I have no “qualifications” other than three degrees and fifteen years as a successful teacher. Tests are supposed to engage students in what they’ve learned and have thus an emotional investment in. Tests can never be the basis of learning.
That's amazing! I think though, that the standardized testing did exactly what it was designed for. Dumbing down and indoctrinating the young students. We see the results in the current crop of self-centered and grandiose uneducated Congress people.
Thanks so much for providing a look/experience of the education system after I went through it.
Terrie Gamino: Yes--exactly. The cynical creation/maintenance of an ignorant constituency ensures their uninformed, albeit enthusiastic, votes will support fascism.
I never liked standardized testing as a kid nor as an adult. Each person learns in different ways. Some can do it by reading and absorbing. Others might be dyslexic where words and meanings can be misconstrued. I am a kinesthetic learner. I must see, feel, and touch what I am trying to comprehend.
Exactly. I worked with 10th graders who'd been pretty much thrown away by the system, and I used to kid them that I didn't want their next year's teacher to get credit for what I'd taught them! The counselors agreed and scheduled these kids to have me for 11th grade, too! With all their various challenges, they benefitted from having a creative, thinking outside the box teacher who was committed to help them survive and thrive in a soul-sucking, mechanized bureaucracy. Many memorable, effective, and beloved teachers had to retire early because their style of teaching was no longer possible--or valued by the system that preferred a so-called business model.
It varies quite a bit, but yes we are seeing far too much emotionally infantile behavior from many with the body and agency of adults. And in a democracy, the focus and labor needed for those in our society to flourish is shared by all, especially by chronological adults.
Same for me, very moved by the story of Beau and the people who visited his grave. Thank you also to Stephen Kyle for another beautiful, important, and poignant story.
So, they sought him out; what about the guys before, behind, to the right and to the left of his cross. They had stories, loved ones, lives not completed, spouses and children never realized too. Frankly, it's just too much to wrap your mind around, how much the world loses in every war.
Beautiful story, Heather. Greatly appreciated. It reminds me of a profound experience I had many years ago when I visited the WW2 cemetery at Omaha Beach, in Normandy, France. It was a bright, crisp, sunny fall day and seeing the rows and rows of crosses was extremely moving. Very quickly, as I scanned the graves, I was drawn to the occasional Jewish stars among the crosses. I went over to one of them, and suddenly, after years of not thinking about the Jewish prayer for the dead, Kaddish, the words to the Kaddish prayer popped into my head and I recited them, in Hebrew, over that grave, and wept.
I felt such a deep connection to my Jewish history, and the poignance of the huge cemetery with all the war dead, knowing that part of that fight included ending the Holocaust in Europe, was very powerful. It is a memory I will never forget.
What a heartbreaking story. Memorial Day trips to the cemeteries were a tradition when I was growing up. So many families had graves of soldiers that had no bodies because they’d been killed overseas. We need to remember all those who, like Beau, left their futures on the battlefields.
Some thoughts about Memorial Day, 2023. I wrote this in a note to a friend and decided to share it.
This Memorial Day weekend, of all times, I have to say that the people who fought and died to keep us free and, unknowingly, were sacrificed to keep the military industrial complex going, didn’t die for a damnable oligarchy to take over this country.
They didn’t fight to enable billionaire tax evaders to make money off of imprisoning people who, had they been born a different color, would not be in prison.
They didn’t suffer to make it possible for slumlords, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and payday loan companies to crush the dreams, bodies, and souls of the working poor. Or to destroy what was once a growing and healthy middle class.
And they didn’t come home broken, shell-shocked, isolated, suicidal and unsupported, for expectant mothers and babies to be stressed to the point of death (rate of Black maternal and infant mortality [2-3x that of Whites] being worse here than in many Global South nations) or for 10-year-old girls raped by relatives to have to carry a baby to term, or for 10-year old children to have to practice active shooter drills in hopes of surviving a school shooting caused, in large part, by elected officials that are stuck on the teat of the NRA and are too gutless and callous to have supported, 20 years ago, paid family leave that could have led to the secure attachment between mothers and babies that makes for teens and young adults who don’t grow up needing drugs, violence, guns, and to kill something or someone to feel they are alive.
Memorial Day?
Those who fought and died didn’t do so for these freedoms to be tossed aside. Nor did they do so for sacred Voting Rights to be stripped by state legislatures because a corrupt and partisan Supreme Court of the United States of America is more concerned about pleasing the morbidly rich who have bought out or influenced judgeships than they are about protecting the RIGHT TO VOTE of every American.
They didn’t sweat, bleed, damn near starve to death, contract Malaria and dysentery, or spend years in concentration camps for trickster thug politicians to Gerrymander voting districts to stack the decks for one party over the other, deny entire voting blocks equal representation, or jerk around with polling places, ballot collection sites, and the rights of humans standing in hours-long lines to be given a non-partisan bottle of WATER while the swelter in the sun as they wait. To. VOTE.
They didn’t miss the births of their children, the ability to comfort dying parents, the opportunity to live life free of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), gnawing anxiety or searing depression, hearing or vision loss — or the loss of limbs and functionality — so some grandstanding politician could run the debt ceiling scam (the debt ceiling was lifted three times under the former guy to pay for services already received) so seniors counting on Social Security would have to worry that their June, 2023 payment would be held up.
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.
All those people whose bodies are buried under all those graves didn’t make the ultimate sacrifice so a few rich and powerful people could exploit our workforce with a minimum wage ($7.25 AN HOUR) that hasn’t been raised since 2009!
It’s a solemn day and a solemn time.
I don’t want you to think I am without hope. I do have hopes that we can turn things around, and I am working hard to do so every day by working to raise awareness of the lifelong impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the protective effects of positive childhood experiences (PCEs). By helping people around the world see the connection between positive and adverse childhood experiences and the connection between adversity and lifelong illnesses and PCEs and resilience, maybe we can go waaaay upstream to help prevent problems.
Hope begins with identifying the scoundrels as you have done, then taking action to remove them from power (expose/vote) and restore the principles of democracy.
Poverty is low-moving trauma. The stresses build into an allostatic load that crushes executive function, reduces the ability to plan/carry out plans and control emotions. Stress experienced by a pregnant woman can result in epigenetic changes that can lead to the child experiencing high levels of anxiety throughout their life. I do not believe how callous we have become, and how impotent to change the soul-and-body killing stresses inflicted by our government upon vulnerable people.
Marge - You are exactly right about all of this. I have to not let it cut my soul to the quick as I ponder the collective hatred. You have said exactly what happens. It is insane that we perpetuate the lack of support. Would we withhold treatment from a cancer patient if we knew it would work? Yeah. Well. With insurance companies having to approve everything, yes. And with an effing Supreme Court that would let a woman’s fallopian tube burst before it would allow her to end a pregnancy — subjecting her, her family, her existing children to the threat of losing her — we see exactly how dire the situation is. Old white men need to die or step aside and get their gavels and grubby paws out of our collective uteri. Thank you.
Thank you, Marge--for pointing out, ". . . how impotent to change the soul-and-body killing stresses inflicted by our government upon vulnerable people." I wonder if we are actually "impotent" or merely indifferent.
Thank you Ms. Richardson for Beau Bryant's story. My three years as an Army dentist in Germany (1973-1976) were no sacrifice at all compared to the Beau Bryant's in our history, but I will think of Beau and all our greatest Americans each time I salute the passing flag in the Doylestown, Pa. Memorial Day Parade, tomorrow. By the way, I was named for Teddy Hoffman, my father's boyhood friend in Toronto, who was lost over the English Channel in WWII.
Thank you for this tender offering. Im grateful to pause and take in the true meaning of this weird holiday, that’s so easily about the start of summer and not about loss and grief and what might have been otherwise.
These are the stories that make the meaning of Memorial Day real, about real people who loved our way of life enough to sign up and play a real part in making our every day freedoms important enough that they risked their very lives for all of our futures. Too many paid the highest price, their very life and we must never forget them. Thank you for reminding us of Beau
Wonderful story. Of my paternal grandmother's three sons who served in WWII, the oldest, Vernon, did not come home. A sergeant in the Army's Ivy Division, he made it through D-Day though wounded near Cherbourg, only to be killed six months later in the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded the Bronze Star for heroic achievement. He was interred with other American soldiers in Luxembourg where his grave was adopted by a wonderful family. One day, the family found flowers on the grave from my grandparents. The family called the florist in Cumberland, MD, and obtained my grandparents' address; they wrote a letter and sent pictures of my uncle's grave. There began a friendship that would last decades. My uncle's body was eventually brought home and laid to rest on a Maryland hillside where his parents and sister later joined him. Now my children have his story.
You are a historian with a heart. Thanks for your work to provide us general readers without your expert's knowledge of American History such insights. // JB Colson, Professor Emeritus, School of Journalism and Fellow, Brisoe Center for American, The University of Texas at Austin. (My field has been photography and I also appreciate Buddy's contributions.)
My Dad was a Marine in WWII and my father in law , also a marine, was in the Korean War. They both saw heavy combat and lost fellow marines. They never complained and rarely spoke of their service or sacrifices but did speak of those we lost, and often reminded us that "freedom is not free" . They were among the lucky ones who returned home, married and had families. My wife and I and our siblings, children, in laws and grandchildren will always hear of our ancestors and their favorite words and what our military does for us. Memorial Day was always a somber day and there is a huge cost of our freedom and our teetering Democracy. Thanks to Ms Richardson for always helping understand today's events with relevant stories from the past. We will never forget those who served
Thank you, Heather. In May of 1943 I was a 6-month old, living in the military housing at Dow Field with my mom and dad, who was an enlisted man, an accountant. He desperately wanted to fly but his eyesight wasn’t good enough. We lived there until the war ended. My earliest memories are of the airmen coming home from Europe, a constant series of bittersweet events. I remember visits to the barracks where the soldiers were always happy to give a piggyback ride to a “Yank kid”. I still remember all the words to the army air corps song, I remember our victory garden, and the blizzards in winter, when mom would take me to the PX on a small sled. The groceries got to ride back, I trundled along in a heavy wool snowsuit. Those were sober times, as even a very young child understood.
Thank you for sharing this story. We need to remember or most of us learn, that for every American military casualty, there were eight industrial casualties on the home front.
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
Mr. Kyle, such a poignant post -- thank you, sir. I had the chance to visit the American Normandy Cemetery at Colleville last year with my grandson, who was 13 at the time. To view all of those headstones, in perfect peaceful rows, was so deeply moving that I was in tears the whole time, imagining lives left unfulfilled, and their grieving loved ones. As the song "Where Have all the Flowers Gone" asks, "When will we ever learn?" And thank you, Heather, for sharing Beau's story.
My spouse and I were at Colleville, in 2017 as part of a trip we took to celebrate 50 years of marriage. Being there leaves an impact that I will always feel. Before retirement I worked in a job with a great deal of international travel so crossing the ocean was no big deal, it was just something I did as much as I hated the insides of airplanes. Being at Normandy and seeing that cemetery made me realize that the families of many of those buried there never had the money to visit. I knew no one buried there but after being there I knew all of them and remember their families this day.
Seeing the photos at the museum of some of those killed during the D-Day assault, along with bios of their brief lives cut short, really brought it home for me. Their bravery remains unimaginable to me -- whether emerging from the landing craft at Omaha, or ascending the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, or jumping out of aircraft. The sheer terror of it all.
Thank you, Mr. Kyle for this powerful and poignant essay. I wish we had an alternative icon to "Like"--one that represents that we "like" your views, but hate the misery of the topic. Those of us who were born into the echoing shadows of the Nuremberg Trials, the blustering venom of Joe McCarthy, the Kefauver Hearings, the Korean non-war, and inspired by the moral compasses of strong, brave, white-hatted good guys on our new 12-inch round screened televisions, protected from the scourge of polio but always on the alert for atom bomb warnings, were galvanized into activism by our own Baby-Boomer moral compass. Brought up in and protected by the relative comfort of the booming 1950s, we got us out of Vietnam, we gained (losing them now) rights for women, we fought against racism--Civil Rights Acts, massive marches, Dr. King--and our music ("Something's Happening' Here . . ." "War, What Is It Good For?", "What's Goin' On?","Fortunate Son.") We provided the US with a conscience and the collective actions that were mandated by that conscience. And we're still out here, with our gray hair--or bald heads, sciatica, stenosis, cataracts, and arthritis, just keepin' on keepin' on, and to paraphrase Marvin , "there's still too many of us dying." Subsequent generations have not experienced this crucible, have no unifying music, are distracted/adrenalized by social media, were not allowed to learn critical thinking skills in their standardized-test-based classrooms, have been sheltered by helicopter parents, and thus lack the focus, skills, and drive to fight for human rights. It feels like we're on "The Eve of Destruction," and without HCR, the answers we need would be, "Blowin' in the Wind."
I play a CD from the PBS set of 60's folk music most evenings while doing a jigsaw puzzle, and remember. Yes, we provided a conscience and collective actions. We still do. We still must.
The pull of our music . . . the soundtrack of our fight . . . for the 20 years that I taught 10th grade English, I augmented the mandatory, "All Quiet on the Western Front" Unit by showing how "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Many of my students had older siblings who were in the military during the Iraq and Afghanistan actions, and I'd developed a project for them featuring Vietnam. My 185 kids each--except for one-- adopted a disabled vet from the Palo Alto and Menlo Park, CA VA medical facilities. One student blew the assignment because despite our readings and discussions, she thought she was supposed to interview a veterinarian. Anyway, 5 times a day for 1 week during those years, I showed the unforgettable, searing documentary, "Dear America: Letters from Vietnam." To my students' delight, I lip-synched the entire soundtrack. This extraordinary documentary is based on the equally extraordinary book, "Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam," edited by Bernard Edelman. Both are heart- wrenching and provide innumerable occasions for very solemn personal and political reflection--perfect for this and every Memorial Day weekend. https://www.vietnamveteransplaza.com/book-film/dear-america-letters-home-from-vietnam-film/
From one active duty military service veteran to you, a teacher: I consider you to have served our country as well as I had ever hoped to. Thank you for your service on this Memorial Day.
Thank you William. My thought exactly. Best to you this Memorial Day.
From one teacher to another-thank you fir your service and for trying to make a difference in the lives of young people.
I'll always remember that, when I was a young child, my early-30s year-old parents used to have several friendly neighborhood high schoolers over, and they'd sit around our kitchen table talking, spin 45s, and drink tea. As I was lying in bed one night, probably age 9 or 10, they talked about the Vietnam War which was escalating under LBJ. The boys were afraid to go, and I distinctly recall one of them saying that when I turned 18 the war would still be going on, and it would be my turn. I lay there frightened by the thought that this may come true.
I turned 18 in 1973, the year the draft lottery only selected one birthdate out of 365 to call into service -- fortunately for me, it was not mine. But it was someone's.
I had a handful of teachers from both elementary and high school who I remember very fondly for what they taught me and how they treated me. One of them, my fourth grade teacher, Saran Morgan Hutchins, gave me an everlasting fascination with Scandinavia, beginning with the Vikings, but extending to the Scandinavia of the present.
I also had a very interesting experience with her. My class with her was very small--12 kids. I read avidly. And at some point when I was in her class, I picked up a Scholastic Book Service book about Charles Lindbergh. I was ultimately spooked to read about the kidnapping of his child. As I remember it, the book was vague about that, and I asked my parents about it, and I think they told me he had been killed.
Decades later, I googled my teacher. Her mother was Lindbergh's wife's sister. I'm sure she knew I was reading the book. I would have been VERY upset had I known then that that child was her cousin (she was born a number of years after he was killed). The whole thing would have become personal. And so I'm grateful she didn't tell me. Among much else that I'm grateful to her for.
So your teacher was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s cousin? Another interesting person - Their father was a diplomat (ambassador to Mexico) and a US senator - NJ. she wrote Gift from the Sea.
No. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's niece. Her mother was AML's sister.
Thank you for your creative, heartfelt teaching.
Thank You!
Well said Joanne; you seem to feel as I do on much, including our legacy, and the threats it certainly faces.
Beautiful and heartbreaking, Joanne. I’m a part of that shrinking generation of “Boomers,” who are now being denigrated and mocked as selfish. Clearly those throwing around those insults are unaware of the seriousness and genuineness of our commitment to peace and love. How many Boomers do we know who dedicated their lives to the Peace Corps, volunteerism, starting and running nonprofits, civil rights, equality....? What % of young people today will follow in those footsteps? I can only pray that our youth are equally engaged, active and dedicated.
Speaking for my own children who spent much of their young lives at Vietnam protests, the answer is almost zero. Despite my providing an example I fully expected them to follow, as I followed my mother's, they are too wrapped up in their own lives to be participatory. Maybe life is just so much more complicated today, it doesn't leave time for outside commitments, and perhaps that's as the power structure intends?
Good points, Dotty. Maybe it skips a generation. My "Children of the Depression" parents weren't political activists--they were too busy working to stave off and protect us from the economic conditions they had suffered as children. My grandparents, on the other hand, were politically active back in the early 1900s in Vilna, and then in the US during the 1930s. My grandmother and I used to share stories of our protest activities--hers against the Czar, and mine against Vietnam, racism, and misogyny.
Thank you Marge, for your kind words. So frustrating to hear Gen X and Millennial women dismiss all we did to make their comfortable lives possible. The recent war on women's reproductive rights could have been prevented if these young women and their mothers had joined our fight to pass the ERA. I am, however, grateful for and impressed by my Gen Z Granddaughter and her friends who seem to have inherited our commitment to human rights.
Thank you Ms. Gilbert -- I wish I could write a tenth as well. You make a strong presentation of the power our baby boomer generation grasped to effect change, at least in the 60s and early 70s (I graduated high school in 1973.) It's a good reminder for me who is more apt to remember us boomers as responsible for disco, leisure suits, and eventually rampant consumerism leading to climate degradation. And much of the idealistic aspirational youth of the 60s and 70s are now red-hatted MAGA types. If only their teen-aged selves could see them now.
I disagree. I can't quote any research, but none of the people I marched with in the 60s are now MAGA.
In the days we were marching against the war there were hecklers along the way and I have no difficulty assuming they are MAGA today.
I refuse to believe that any of the thousands of us who were there for the First March on Washington against the Vietnam War in April of 1965 have devolved into supporters of the destruction of Democracy.
While we might have been born into the same families, 1st Wave Boomers have little in common with 2nd Wave Boomers. They are Boomers only for post-war birthrate analysis. They did not share our experiences.
Thanks for your kind words. One way to define, "Baby Boomer," in the aggregate is by birth years: 1946-1964, when the birthrate surged. Another way is more sociological, by recognizing that the childhoods between 1946 and 1954 ( 1st Wave or Early Baby Boomers) differed greatly from those between 1955 and 1964 2nd Wave or Jones's). While these two cohorts can be combined for post war birthrate purposes, their perceptions, experiences and zeitgeists were and are very different. For example, no one I ever knew as a teenager has turned into an Acultamurican. We are just as motivated and determined to be active for human rights as we always were. As the first kids born post-war to the returning GIs, newly liberated Holocaust Survivors, 1st generation to have TV, we were teenagers in the mid 60s. Our world was very different from our younger siblings, and we had a distinctly different experience than those of you who were teenagers in the 70s.
Thank you Ms. Gilbert -- your dissection of boomers confirms what I've long thought about our generation. And I bet you were an effective English teacher, one whose class I doubtless would have enjoyed attending. Please allow me to elaborate.
I never liked "grammar" in grade school or "English" in jr. high -- learning the rules bored me to death. (Spelling was the only part I did well in, as I was a very good speller.) Anyway, freshman English was equally dreadful, taught by Mrs. S. who, I later found out, was having personal issues. One day, she walked up and down each row of desks and told each student either "I like you" or "I don't like you". I was one of the "don't likes", and the feeling was mutual. Absolutely a true story. (Apologies for lengthy retelling of my experiences.)
Suffice it to say I failed frosh English and had to retake it in 10th grade, taught by Mr. M., who gave me an A and kept asking me how I could have failed it the 1st go-round. From that point on I loved English, and fondly remember my 10th grade teacher, Mrs. M. as well as my later ones.Teachers DO make a difference. (My daughter and youngest sister both teach elementary Ed, my brother teaches at college level, and my mom was meant to be a teacher, but life got in the way.) I'm sure your students remember you fondly, Ms. Gilbert.
Thanks so much, Mr. Gagne! I definitely was a subversive teacher--and often in trouble with the administrators! I also issues with grammar. Never could diagram a sentence, so I refused to teach it. Still don't know what the purpose was. Also refused to teach semi-colons. I've stayed in touch with many of my former students and am grateful for their friendship.
The time of the later 60's early 70's many were anti-war actively, organized in marches. Many also went back to the land, to grow food and eat organically, compost the soil... and live together in communities. There were "Be-in's" and "Love-in's". This was a time that Yoga and Transcendental mediation became popular along with mind-expanding drugs like LSD. Books were written, art was made, and the music was extraordinary at times. Some folks went on to finish college and attain higher degrees dedicating their lives to doing good work. Many stopped preaching about love and no more war and turned inward realizing that living it personally was "where it was at". The more recent "Occupy Wall Street" movement was a reverberation/echo. At the same time that so many dropped out, many others did not. Those two strains came out of the 60's and 70's.
Yup.Luv ya sister☮️
I share a lot of those Vietnam-era events with you. As a p.s. to those times, I thought to add my own experience and perception of the period. Opposition to the war seemed a bit slow in building nationally. As a sophomore (at Indiana University Bloomington) in April 1966, I saw the first and only anti-war demonstration I knew of. There was a counter-demonstration at the same time. They were orderly, mostly quiet marches, and even light-hearted as students slightly badgered each other. From then on, opposition began to slowly grow. I didn't hear MLK or RFK speak out against the war until 1968.
By then, more people were speaking out about the draft. The draft is where we began to be aware of economic class differences. Most of us middle-class and poor kids accepted that we would be subject to the draft as our fathers had been in WWII. Not that we accepted the growing war, but we did accept a commitment to service. I noticed that the affluent parents were more active in helping their teenage sons avoid the draft and military service (e.g., hiring expensive psychiatrists to buy an exemption for "Jimmy" or having their sons dress up in women's clothing and play gay or whatever other ruse). Later, there were others who just said, "I'm not going into service." I admired David Harris (Joan Baez's husband) for taking that principled stand, and he did about a year in jail for that as I recall.
The most impressive anti-Vietnam War force I know of was General David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. He grew up on a small farm in Indiana and had solid, sensible, fair values. He served in WWII and was a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his service in the Pacific war. He had worked his way through the ranks to the top where he was appointed Commandant by President Eisenhower and then kept in that position by JFK who valued his counsel in multiple foreign policies. Gen. Shoup said the Vietnam War was wrong evem before the U.S. sent any troops there He said that it was exploitative of a small, poor nation, and he refused to send Marines to that war. That is amazing stuff--a Commandant refusing to send his troops into an illegal, immoral war. A month after JFK was assassinated, Gen. Shoup resigned from the Marine Corps (Dec. 1963. He was probably forced into it by LBJ who was bonded to the MIC by then. In 1966, Three years after resigning from the Marines, Gen. Shoup gave a speech at Pierce College saying, “I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.” This was a career military leader and recipient of the Medal of Honor saying this. Ike was very impressed by Shoup and probably learned a lot more about the MIC from Gen. Shoup. General David Shoup should be acknowledged in all American history books. I'll remember him again this Memorial Day.
Thanks, Heydon, for your heartfelt, accurate and informative post. Let's all honor General David Shoup and Beau Bryant on this and every Memorial Day.
And some of us after 70 years of anti war protests, precinct captaining, constant involvement in local and national activism and a very few wins like women getting to make procreation decisions for themselves, are just too discouraged by current events to do anything more. I was born during WWII which they promised would be the last one only to find us in Korea a few years later. The terror of the McCarthy years are being recreated but now the screens on which we're lied to are 60" wide and in living color and on 24/7. "When will it ever end, when will it ever end?"
Dotty Hopkins: Yes. So very true. Tragically, it won't ever end until every one is in a grave yard because "they" will never learn.
Money and power, the strongest driving forces in most politics and also the most destructive.
Bravo!
Perfectly said
Thank you.
And the MIC budget remains untouched as it continues to skyrocket, partly because of obscene costs imposed by subcontractors. The war machine makes many people very wealthy, alas.
The US "spends" 37% of the world's expenditures on "defense". Or put it this way, the US military industrial complex pockets more than the military budgets of the next seven largest budgets combined. "U.S. military spending dwarfs the budget of the #2 country – China. For every dollar China spends on its military, the U.S. spends $2.77."
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/
When President Biden is re-elected and we take back Congress with strong majorities, one of our work list items should be an audit of the "Defense" budget. I suspect we could find a lot of fraud, redundancies, wastefulness and inefficiencies. And those billions could go a long way to paying our military personnel better, providing more post service assistance such as education, apprenticeships and job placement services.
We should also be offering better healthcare for Veterans and their families. A Vet can come home disabled or too traumatized to do the work he or she did before. There is a wide range of suffering that is more than the relatively recently accepted PTSD.
And too little is written about the impact of war on dependents and loved ones who are essentially abandoned by the money grubbing system that blew up their lives.
We could do all that good work for Veterans, feed our kids, educate our kids, eliminate homelessness and much more with a cleaned up "Defense" budget and proper taxes on the Oligarchs who have been milking the system for decades.
Bill You are right that our ‘defense budget’ is as porous as Swiss cheese. Some major construction projects (ships, planes, tanks) are extraordinarily over budget, years behind production schedules, and, too often, a bad product that doesn’t work.
If you send me your e-mail, I will send you my expansive review of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ book DUTY. SecDef under Bush and Obama, I consider Gates America’s best SecDef, with the possible exception of legendary General George C. Marshall.
Gates spells out in sickening detail how failing defense projects are not cancelled. Also, he underscores that, when the Pentagon seeks to end or curtail a flagging program, often Congressmen add massive $$$ to the budget to keep production rolling at a congressional district factory.
My impression is that no one knows where ‘all the bodies are buried’ in the defense budget. Then, of course, there is the competition between Navy, Army, Air Force (and ‘Space Command’) for bucks.
As Gates discovered, the Pentagon was skilled in planning for war but was ill equipped to actually fighting a war. He provided numerous examples of how he personally intervened to obtain timely support for soldiers in the field.
There is also as publication [Taxpayers for Common Sense?) that provides stomach-churning examples of defense wastage.
[Gates has been chair of an organization where I have been a long-time trustee. Face-to-face, he is just as impressive as the author of DUTY.]
From "60 Minutes"
"Perhaps no one understands the problem better than Shay Assad, now retired after four decades negotiating weapons deals. In the 1990s, he was executive vice president and chief contract negotiator for defense giant Raytheon. Then he switched sides… under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Assad rose to be the Defense Department's most senior and awarded contract negotiator. The Pentagon, he told us, overpays for almost everything – for radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.
Shay Assad: This, Bill, is an oil pressure switch that NASA used to buy. Well, ***their oil switch cost with all of the cabling cost $328. This oil switch we paid over $10,000 for it.*** [emphasis added]
Bill Whitaker: So what accounts for that huge difference?
Shay Assad: Gouging. What-- what else can account for it?"
How utterly outrageous is that?? And that's just one part/component of goodness knows how many.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/weapons-contractors-price-gouging-pentagon-60-minutes-transcript-2023-05-21/
Mimi Dod has never shopped at Cosco or the Dollar Store. They use an unending credit card. Yuck.
Yuck, indeed, Keith.
Mim
I was looking for this to post. It is very depressing and has been going on for a very long time.
Far too long. Maybe someday it can be controlled somehow.
"Gates spells out in sickening detail how failing defense projects are not cancelled. Also, he underscores that, when the Pentagon seeks to end or curtail a flagging program, often Congressmen add massive $$$ to the budget to keep production rolling at a congressional district factory."
And this practice of continuing and adding onto defense projects even when they are failing and wasting money has amazing and long term effects.
Clear back in the 1960s the States of Washington and California derived more than 50% of their economies from Military Industrial Complex companies and military bases. Oregon derived 3% of its economy from MIC sources. The only military bases that survived in Oregon were Coast Guard. Oregon also had anti war Senators and Representatives...probably not a coincidence.
To this day Oregon's economy is much smaller than Washington's or California's. Oh, yes, there are myriad other differences and Oregon is incredibly lucky to have been left behind in this race to insanity... I thank Godde every day for Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield.
The point is that getting on the MIC gravy train influences all kinds of obscure parts of life for people who live anywhere near the bases and/or the factories.
There is an an excellent non-profit organization that does an excellent job of exposing government waste in military contracting: The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is a nonpartisan independent watchdog that investigates and exposes waste, corruption, abuse of power, ... See POGO.Org.
Of course Pogo knew that we were our own enemy.
Bill, I totally agree. Eisenhower was correct to warn us about the military-industrial complex but lobbyists win out in DC. It’s shameful that we are witnessing tent cities again; women who must travel up to 900 miles to choose an abortion (and wonder if they will be criminalized when they return home); the militarization of police who seem to feel entitled to execute at will any Black man.... and the endless wars. If I were younger, I’d be looking at Canada - fleeing my country as did young men facing the draft into an immoral war.
All of this expenditure for the US military-industrial complex. Add to that the US is far and away number one in the amount of guns among the general population. Coincidence?
Good point. I suspect we are stuck in a mind set that says "Might is right" or "My way or the highway" or "We know best, so drop your weapon".
Which suggests a primitive, violence based society. Not much different from other vertebrates who compete for dominance.
The obscene and ultimately self-defeating power and profits of the MIC evoke the dark side of an ouroboros.
And the Republicans added even MORE to the defense outlay in their new debt ceiling deal!!
But we are no longer teetering on the precipice of default, and that is huge. One day the defense budget and subcontractor charges will be investigated and brought under some kind of control. One day.
Because the far right wing in the House and Senate value their "power" more than they do their country, I fear we are still teetering.
Gosh, I hope you're wrong, Ann.
I definitely hope so, too.
You think so?
Ann W: We are still teetering. Postponing catastrophe without taking effective actions is a temporary fix. And since the Rs won't let us take effective action, this teetering becomes more dangerous.
read Rep Matt Rosendale's fb post & the comments of his followers urging him not to vote & let us default, I am not so certain we are still not teetering until it is past.
I hope you, too, like Ann W, are wrong, Carole. I cannot imagine what a historic U.S. default will do to the world. Let us imagine the best outcome and put those vibes out there, okay?
I know!!! However reading Rosendales fb post & the comments supporting his position on default in ignorance of what it means to EVERYONE , no matter how positive the vibes it is NOT getting to those who blindly follow those who are bent on destroying our democracy. How many others with representatives who are members of the freedom caucus are voting no
The bill representing the debt ceiling compromise still must pass the House—if McCarthy and Jeffries can corral enough members from their extreme wings—and the Senate, where opposing windbags like Rand Paul might choose to slow it down with endless “Look at ME” speeches. We are still teetering on the edge of catastrophic default.
Let’s hope so ... It and WE must ...!!!
I am liberal and think all politicians are to blame for crazy wars and waste. Republican more than Democrat, however, no one is blameless.
Kill! They seem unable to see any other way.
Brenda Phillips, we may need the additional for Ukraine. I wish it were to get rid of military “contractors,” who I fear rip US off as a matter of course.
That is too true. In America, today, the real god is MONEY
Today????
Well. every day!
I think war and greed are universal sins, and we are not the only sinners.
I think you just said it-"The war machine makes many people wealthy...".
Defense spending is sold to the American public as "jobs," and that is certainly true. Nearly every congressional district has a major defense contractor -- mine is Boeing Helicopters, builders of the Osprey -- and those contractors are usually the largest employers in that district, employing thousands at very good salaries and employing many skilled workers, engineers, mechanics, fabricators, designers and so on. Where else would they get such good jobs? This is the bulk of manufacturing in America outside of the auto industry.
I join in thanking you Mr. Kyle, for your noble thoughts and reminiscences on this Memorial Day. Forgive me as I write in stream of consciousness style.
For over a decade from the late '80s through the early aughts, I played recreation league softball with a gaggle of friends, in parks throughout Los Angeles. Toward the end of that period, we were playing in a park in West Los Angeles, where an older man (I was in my early forties then, and am 62 now) named Lou would walk through the park on Sunday morning, and sit in the bleachers and root us on as we played. He was a longtime resident of the neighborhood, and hoisted beers with us after our games. After one game day a day before Memorial Day, he and I found ourselves on adjacent stools with the NBA playoffs on the tv above us adding to the usual happy din of raised voices and hearty razzing. When I mentioned the holiday the next day, he smiled, said something anodyne, and then went uncharacteristically silent. I took a beat, then asked him what was wrong. Then, this kind man looked off in a distance only he could see, and started to cry. He commenced to tell me of his service in England on the verge of D Day, with a squadron of men knowing only that they would be part of the Normandy invasion, while not knowing exactly when and where on the beach. That day like every day I saw Lou, a St. Louis native, he was wearing his bright red Cardinals cap. He told me of a friend of his that he grew up with who had joined the service with him, who was assigned to another squadron, and who had been shipped out from the training area, wrapped in secrecy, in the dead of night to reconnoiter on the English channel. He learned the next day that the craft that squadron had employed, had been sighted by the German U boat defenses, attacked, and sunk. Nobody had survived. Because the invasion remained imminent, and the Allies had sought to deceive the Germans as to where it would take place, none of the families were notified at the time. All of the remaining soldiers/sailors/airmen poised to invade were sworn to silence.
This gray haired, spritely retiree was 18 years old in 1944, half a world away from home, the same town where he and his friend grew up, and would neither see his friend ever again, nor be able to discuss what happened to him with his family. He sat on an imitation leather bar stool next to me, and with a face wracked with emotion and thoughts of the friend he lost so swiftly and so harshly, he returned to that terrible night of his youth, and sobbed. I said nothing, bought him another Budweiser, and left my hand on his shoulder until he gradually came back to the present.
The burden that these men and women carry with them as survivors, and the heavily redolent memories they have of the fallen are so overwhelming as to be unbearable.
May God bless and comfort them all, and may someday, someday, the white dove finally sleep in the sand.
In June 1943 he (1) graduated high school; (2) turned 19; and (3) was drafted. After basic he trained in England but his group wasn’t ready on D Day. He crossed later. Patton’s Third Army. He came home, restarted his life and got married. He answered my questions when I asked them but not until after he died did I more fully trace his steps. He was my hero, in so many ways.
FYI, my dad was in the Third Army too. Same exact deal, same age, same outcome. Except: he mostly kept it inside and it ate him up alive for decades. I wrote a story about it: https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2023/03/28/thirty-nine-bye-byes/
Thanks, Martin. My dad didn’t have it as rough, at least as far as I could see.
My dad was also in Patton’s 3rd army (I think) because he never spoke of the war. I knew from mom that he was in the Battle of the Bulge and she said the he was never the same when he returned. They married in 1943 and had 7 children. When mom died after 51 years of marriage, I asked him what the war was like. He only said that it was the coldest winter on record and it was over 60 days before he saw the inside of a building. My mom had 3 brothers in the war and lost lost her brother Albert in Italy. She said of the war that everybody lost someone. When I think of all the hardships that we go through, still nothing compares to the time of the Great Depression and Hitler’s rise and WWII.
I did know the Third Army liberated a concentration camp, and with research I’m fairly sure it was Mauthausen.
Thank you for telling the story.
Daniel:
He shared a memory of friends and people lost which so many of us carry. What could of been will never be for them. A strange twist of fate made him the carrier of that memory and a shared message rarely discussed in public.
I think you are spot on, Bill. Thank you for your thoughts.
May God bless them all.
Kyle: thank you so very much for your well written and well researched essay! We all have many memories of grief and loss. I won’t share mine but your essay brought it all back and while I grieve as I write this, it is important (at least for me and I suspect for others who are reading this) that we remember, cry, and appreciate the relationship that while ended in life never ends until we ourselves die. But then others will grieve for us and the rhythm of life and death continues forever, doesn’t it? Thank you for bringing that back for me and undoubtedly for all who read your essay.
It seems our desire for violence and war has turned inward and the number of lives lost to mass shootings continues to mount with ever more restrictions on guns loosened and hateful speech applauded on radical media that used to have some baseline of decency.
Linda, I often shake my head trying to understand how it is that the supposedly most evolved and intelligent species on this planet is also the most violent and the most prone to killing for no other reason than CONTROL. My theory is that it begins with potty training and then spirals to unimaginable heights. And now it is personal since we have the guns to move it along even faster.
Gina, unfortunately and sadly, it’s more than “CONTROL” - but that’s a subject [mass killings, random violence, easy availability and access to weapons intended for warfare, misinterpretation of the intent of the second amendment, etc., et al] that will require the work of several blue ribbon panels, committees, along with graduate and post-graduate level courses and a responsible and honorable president along with an equally or superiorly responsible and honorable Congress to review and implement responsible legislation and laws for us to abide by!!!
Gina-Here's a response I hadn't thought of until I read your comment. It startled me.
"how it is that the supposedly most evolved and intelligent species on this planet is also the most violent" is self-explanatory in the sense that humans are more chimp-like than bonobo-related. What I mean is that wherever humans evolved, there is a record of conflict and strife. Who were/are the problem-solvers? Why, those who can see through the fog, step outside the box, and find new ways to win.
The best minds in physics, all of them genii, developed the atomic bomb of all things. The most violent possible invention in our history. Because it was used on an enemy of ours at the time, we really had no choice but to accept the results, and protesters were castigated as "unAmerican. Violence , resting quietly in our amygdalas, only needs a waker upper to spring into action as an emotion justified by a rationale later. Everybody has this part of the brain, it is the reptilian heritage. We carry the primitive history of our species, not always to a beneficial result.
Because the evolution you refer to is the dressing on our reptilian (emotionally driven) component, the various attempts to hogtie our emotions so we can work together as a community. But what we cannot do is completely excise the part of us that responds to threat. Our survival depends on it. The problem is what we are led to believe, (think about that phrase, led to, a messenger convinces us) isn't always a true threat, but a manufactured one for control. I remember watching the hearings before Bush's war on Iraq took place; I was in a coffee shop with several older men, most of whom were sceptical of the arguments, pointedly the Colin Powell justifications. Everyone I was with remarked that he didn't come across as sincere, that he didn't believe his own script. But what the hell, we didn't like those (choose your own disparaging insult), and Bush must know more than we did.
During the history of the U.S., since 1776, we have NOT been at war for 16 whole years. And yes, I have relatives who gave their lives in the name of Peace.
I could describe the time I rode with 3000 other bikers, mostly VN veterans, escorting the VN Moving Wall from the community college in Binghamton NY to the NYS state Fairgrounds in Syracuse. We had the left lane of I 81, stretched for 42 miles according to the State Police. Flags were flying at every overpass, held aloft by fire dept ladder trucks, an old man stood on top of his truck camper saluting the procession, our average speed was nearly 60, noise, grimmest faces I ever saw, wind, rain, sun, more wind gusts. POW MIA flags flew on most Harleys, the signature ride of that brotherhood. If you were there and not shaken to your core, you (the general you) have no concept of what these vets went through. War is Hell, and then some.
Ed - "'𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘷𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵' is self-explanatory in the sense that humans are more chimp-like than bonobo-related. What I mean is that wherever humans evolved, there is a record of conflict and strife."
Observing the social dynamics and power struggles of chimpanzees -- our closest genetic relatives -- offers illuminating insights into human behavior.
https://www.netflix.com/watch/81349316?trackId=255824129
Gina, may I suggest reading The Dawn of Everything? It was an eye-opener for me. There was a time in human development when we were not so militant. There were societies that gave "us" models for community living and democratic consensus. They are not defunct, but it is more like "the squeaky wheel that gets the grease," that has become the norm.
The answer is to be vigilant against authoritarianism and suppression...and I think we are. Authoritarians rely on the cover of secrecy, wealth, and power. May we always speak truth to authority and do what many are doing...shine a light on them.
As the ruses, money, and Machiavellian evil of the Trumps, Putins, oligarchs, et al are exposed—and they are more and more— good will prevail. But good is always in need of our untiring support.
Thank you Hope.
I will check out that book and read it.
I agree that we must be vigilant and most of all NEVER give up. But sometimes we get so frustrated at the need to push through any feelings of defeat or backward movement which is what it amounts to with the forces pushing us in the wrong direction.
It will be up to the youth to carry that torch forward and I think they are up to it from what I see. They can certainly see that they have the work cut out for them since my generation won't be around for much longer.
Gina, I don't know what I would do if it weren't for Substacks such as LFAA. The country and the world are so pulled apart by oligarchs, greed, and misinformation. I rely on these letters for truth, sensibility and—more and more—companionship.
Maybe we are more closely related to the other populous mammal on the planet than we think?
The Rat.
Mike, rats get a bad rap but they are quite resourceful and creative in their ability to survive. So yes, maybe we are more closely related to them. I guess in time we will find out.
we should draft the bastards.
We became a nation under God in 1954. Maybe we’re approaching a time when we can shed the national god and embrace the spirits of our people.
Beautifully written. Yours and Heather’s.
Now 84, I’ve known my share.
Auschwitz survivors, the leading citizens of Vilnius, they lost over 90 relatives each in the fascist conflict that destroyed Europe and the Baltic states now worried about Russia, again.
Oh Europe, Jewish, of course, or different, there were 6 million, the “Never Again” generation now experiencing never in the USA anew, Jews will not replace us, chanted by white US fascists sporting swastika tattoos, waving the Confederate flag - the haters of January 6th, think of Dachau and Buchenwald, it’s all of a piece. Some complained, others died silently. They walked to the gas chambers. It did not matter.. Germans voted Hitler, then were not to vote or speak, only to obey, libraries closed to truth. Caring was outlawed.
Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma, South or North Carolina, Michigan or Nebraska, Montana or Wyoming, .. it doesn’t matter. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and the living ’ is Easy c
" ... and the cotton is high ... "
Paul Robeson, Rutgers All American, football, a lawyer, refused work for his color, went to Moscow, pneumonia, sang.
Stephen, you really got me when I read the numbers of soldiers who have died by suicide. Seeing that in black and white took me aback. I honor my father, a WWII Army veteran and a Holocaust victim. I also honor my husband, a Vietnam veteran (1968-1969) in the Army. My dad was in Papua New Guinea for four years. My husband was stationed out of My Tho for 1 year too long. War is hell.
The 1.4 million American service men and women dead in wars brings to mind the 1.4 million or so dead and continuing to die of covid19. And, how that has been ignored by those who claimed this was natural, that it interfered with their way of life by asking them to proactively prevent spread, or that all the protections and disease was a political and medical hoax.
Both in war and life, we make individual and community decisions that risk life and death. Mistakes were made in every war. In some cases, we acted too late allowing evil people to spread their misinformation and verbal violence against others until this erupted into war. Often the aggressors feel they can take what they want with no consequences or resistance. At other times, we became the aggressors by allowing the frenzy of fear to drive us into unwarranted conflicts like the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
I grew up on WWII stories from my parents’ generation who returned. As well as the history books that displayed every battle. And early TV programs like “You Were There” showing actual film of WWII battles and destruction. It was not meant to be entertaining. It was meant to be a warning to all of us to watch out for people like Hitler and those who foolishly followed him into Hell.
We, close to your 81, share a view which was influenced by the reported truths of the Vietnam era. WWII and Korea also filled our youthful knowledge of wars with truths as well. The loss of family and the return of those, both damaged and victor, spoke of a powerful need to avoid war. Yet, we believed from that era of truth all around us, the stained webbing at the war surplus market and later a need to build fallout shelters, that we must win all future war.
Today we have less certain truths, having been led into less certain wars, and voices such as yours offer an important spanning of that history.
Excellent post, Stephen Kyle. You remark how the war protests for Vietnam have not repeated. This was the first war (and only) that came through our television sets, deeply shocking Americans. Since then the camera coverage of wars has been limited. It is not permitted to film boxes of returning soldiers’ bodies being unloaded from planes. Yes, the government learned a lot from Vietnam, sanitizing the potent reality we at home see if the ongoing horror of our endless wars.
I’ve been protesting, resisting, and writing about the consequences of war since I became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. I wrote the Resistance Trilogy as a gift to generations that followed — to express how exciting, terrifying, ingenious, dangerous, hilarious, serious, and sexy the resistance movements of the sixties really were. So from Jane @bookandbeveragereview
charlesdegelman.org/.../new-genera…...
I am following you now on Twitter.
Well said, sir!
We're close to the same age -- 78 here. Involved in any anti-war demo I could find and still relentlessly calling for a full transparent audit of the Department of Offense. Afghanistan, Iraq, and southern Syria and items in a history book -- but with no war, no imminent or even likely threat, Offense still gets a trillion. Yes, they say 900 billion but Offense squirrels away enormous amounts of their budget in Education, Interior, Energy, Transportation, Commerce, Labor, -- probably all of them. Kyle, that's what the 1% invests in -- the flood of military purchases. Billions of money to those in the stock-market \-know. And that's why the Offense just gets larger and larger and larger. . . .
Stephen Kyle -- "National Mourning Day" is a much more apt label for this day. Instead it seems to have generally become a celebration, a time for barbeques and parties, a day off from drudge. Thank you.
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.
Emotional intelligence. A quality of maturity and compassion it seems the current crop of the people who are supposed to be doing the work to keep our democracy in order are completely devoid of.
When standardized testing supplanted actual education, students were deprived of the opportunity to develop maturity and compassion. Critical thinking skills do not comport with multiple choice tests.
I agree. I think standardized testing may reveal something useful, but it is a narrow and limited tool, hardly a measure of human nature and potential that none of us fully understands in any case. We could teach kids to be observant, aware, and empathetic, and to question everything ; but we would have to be willing to put up with the amount of work that would be to manage and unsure of where it would take us. I think it would be well worth it.
Standardized tests don't really reveal anything useful except meaningless statistics for giving bureaucrats power over education. Those of us who were committed to and practiced the art and science of educating human beings before standardized testing, did a pretty good job of nourishing, cultivating, and inspiring informed, active, humanitarians.
I feel you have sparked the spirit and soul of many of your students.
And teaching them to be observant, aware, and empathetic, and to question everything would also require us to face our own history more objectively than a good portion of our political leaders have the intestinal fortitude to handle. On arrival in country, the latrine wall in Da Nang read "Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the baddest m********ker in the valley": the principle that is still operative and drives our unending love of war, its consequences be damned. There is just too much money to be made producing the weapons that we and our friends (and enemies) use in conducting war. Viet Nam's lessons were not learned by the leaders who took us into Iraq and Afghanistan: the profits to be made were just to much to resist.
James Vander Poel: So true.
Since no child left behind education has become a training program for teaching to the test. Texas gets their test from a UK company. Millions of dollars poured into another country for political purposes. I tell my students, it’s just one snapshot of your education and you are so much more than a score from that test!
It's a snapshot of students' ability to psych out a multiple choice test. It's a money-making industry in which kids and teachers are collateral damage.
Yes! Learning has been quantified like stock market quotes. We now operate out of the same “counting,” paradigm for everything. The “market” is all now. And to make sure it stays that way everyone needs to stay fearful and carrying their own AK47.
Joanne,
Harvard’s original and still common entrance requirements were family “standing”.
That is one reason John Adams had to sweat gaining entrance to Harvard unlike John Hancock.
Standardized testing was instituted, in substantial part, to introduce some kind of academic performance assessment.
But. Those assessments are still ignored at Ivy if your family standing is high enough or, like Jared Kushner, your Dad can donate $2 million bucks to Harvard.
So. Although I am a fan of looking at high school class rank instead of SAT because that is more highly correlated with college rank at graduation, I would still support ANY academic assessment at Harvard and Ivy.
Currently there is none.
Brava, Joanne Gilbert! Teachers have been hamstrung by “rules.” It’s why I never did an education course, but taught from memory of my best teachers. I could still teach, but there is nowhere that would allow it as I have no “qualifications” other than three degrees and fifteen years as a successful teacher. Tests are supposed to engage students in what they’ve learned and have thus an emotional investment in. Tests can never be the basis of learning.
Thanks, Virginia! Your comments are powerfully true. PS: Maybe Math or Science "tests" have value.
That's amazing! I think though, that the standardized testing did exactly what it was designed for. Dumbing down and indoctrinating the young students. We see the results in the current crop of self-centered and grandiose uneducated Congress people.
Thanks so much for providing a look/experience of the education system after I went through it.
Terrie Gamino: Yes--exactly. The cynical creation/maintenance of an ignorant constituency ensures their uninformed, albeit enthusiastic, votes will support fascism.
I never liked standardized testing as a kid nor as an adult. Each person learns in different ways. Some can do it by reading and absorbing. Others might be dyslexic where words and meanings can be misconstrued. I am a kinesthetic learner. I must see, feel, and touch what I am trying to comprehend.
Exactly. I worked with 10th graders who'd been pretty much thrown away by the system, and I used to kid them that I didn't want their next year's teacher to get credit for what I'd taught them! The counselors agreed and scheduled these kids to have me for 11th grade, too! With all their various challenges, they benefitted from having a creative, thinking outside the box teacher who was committed to help them survive and thrive in a soul-sucking, mechanized bureaucracy. Many memorable, effective, and beloved teachers had to retire early because their style of teaching was no longer possible--or valued by the system that preferred a so-called business model.
They were so lucky to have you!
Thanks, Marlene--I was so lucky to have them!!
It varies quite a bit, but yes we are seeing far too much emotionally infantile behavior from many with the body and agency of adults. And in a democracy, the focus and labor needed for those in our society to flourish is shared by all, especially by chronological adults.
Some people who, instead of maturing, simply rotted.
So true. As Langston Hughes told us, like a "dream deferred," they either rotted and festered, and sometimes, exploded.
Same for me, very moved by the story of Beau and the people who visited his grave. Thank you also to Stephen Kyle for another beautiful, important, and poignant story.
So, they sought him out; what about the guys before, behind, to the right and to the left of his cross. They had stories, loved ones, lives not completed, spouses and children never realized too. Frankly, it's just too much to wrap your mind around, how much the world loses in every war.
WW2 especially horrific with the deaths of nearly a hundred million worldwide.
Same here, Mim--
This one made me cry….thanks Heather….
Think we need to remember Beau…when the political lies are told and repeated and the hostility gets noxious….
Beau’s death occurred to protect us from fascism…. Not promote it.
Your tears, you cry for me.
Beautiful story, Heather. Greatly appreciated. It reminds me of a profound experience I had many years ago when I visited the WW2 cemetery at Omaha Beach, in Normandy, France. It was a bright, crisp, sunny fall day and seeing the rows and rows of crosses was extremely moving. Very quickly, as I scanned the graves, I was drawn to the occasional Jewish stars among the crosses. I went over to one of them, and suddenly, after years of not thinking about the Jewish prayer for the dead, Kaddish, the words to the Kaddish prayer popped into my head and I recited them, in Hebrew, over that grave, and wept.
I felt such a deep connection to my Jewish history, and the poignance of the huge cemetery with all the war dead, knowing that part of that fight included ending the Holocaust in Europe, was very powerful. It is a memory I will never forget.
What a heartbreaking story. Memorial Day trips to the cemeteries were a tradition when I was growing up. So many families had graves of soldiers that had no bodies because they’d been killed overseas. We need to remember all those who, like Beau, left their futures on the battlefields.
Some thoughts about Memorial Day, 2023. I wrote this in a note to a friend and decided to share it.
This Memorial Day weekend, of all times, I have to say that the people who fought and died to keep us free and, unknowingly, were sacrificed to keep the military industrial complex going, didn’t die for a damnable oligarchy to take over this country.
They didn’t fight to enable billionaire tax evaders to make money off of imprisoning people who, had they been born a different color, would not be in prison.
They didn’t suffer to make it possible for slumlords, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and payday loan companies to crush the dreams, bodies, and souls of the working poor. Or to destroy what was once a growing and healthy middle class.
And they didn’t come home broken, shell-shocked, isolated, suicidal and unsupported, for expectant mothers and babies to be stressed to the point of death (rate of Black maternal and infant mortality [2-3x that of Whites] being worse here than in many Global South nations) or for 10-year-old girls raped by relatives to have to carry a baby to term, or for 10-year old children to have to practice active shooter drills in hopes of surviving a school shooting caused, in large part, by elected officials that are stuck on the teat of the NRA and are too gutless and callous to have supported, 20 years ago, paid family leave that could have led to the secure attachment between mothers and babies that makes for teens and young adults who don’t grow up needing drugs, violence, guns, and to kill something or someone to feel they are alive.
Memorial Day?
Those who fought and died didn’t do so for these freedoms to be tossed aside. Nor did they do so for sacred Voting Rights to be stripped by state legislatures because a corrupt and partisan Supreme Court of the United States of America is more concerned about pleasing the morbidly rich who have bought out or influenced judgeships than they are about protecting the RIGHT TO VOTE of every American.
They didn’t sweat, bleed, damn near starve to death, contract Malaria and dysentery, or spend years in concentration camps for trickster thug politicians to Gerrymander voting districts to stack the decks for one party over the other, deny entire voting blocks equal representation, or jerk around with polling places, ballot collection sites, and the rights of humans standing in hours-long lines to be given a non-partisan bottle of WATER while the swelter in the sun as they wait. To. VOTE.
They didn’t miss the births of their children, the ability to comfort dying parents, the opportunity to live life free of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), gnawing anxiety or searing depression, hearing or vision loss — or the loss of limbs and functionality — so some grandstanding politician could run the debt ceiling scam (the debt ceiling was lifted three times under the former guy to pay for services already received) so seniors counting on Social Security would have to worry that their June, 2023 payment would be held up.
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.
All those people whose bodies are buried under all those graves didn’t make the ultimate sacrifice so a few rich and powerful people could exploit our workforce with a minimum wage ($7.25 AN HOUR) that hasn’t been raised since 2009!
It’s a solemn day and a solemn time.
I don’t want you to think I am without hope. I do have hopes that we can turn things around, and I am working hard to do so every day by working to raise awareness of the lifelong impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the protective effects of positive childhood experiences (PCEs). By helping people around the world see the connection between positive and adverse childhood experiences and the connection between adversity and lifelong illnesses and PCEs and resilience, maybe we can go waaaay upstream to help prevent problems.
❤️🦋❤️
Thank you Carey. This is so very well said.
Thank you, Carey. Very powerful.
Hope begins with identifying the scoundrels as you have done, then taking action to remove them from power (expose/vote) and restore the principles of democracy.
Thank you Carey. Well said. Unfortunately true--all of it.
Poverty is low-moving trauma. The stresses build into an allostatic load that crushes executive function, reduces the ability to plan/carry out plans and control emotions. Stress experienced by a pregnant woman can result in epigenetic changes that can lead to the child experiencing high levels of anxiety throughout their life. I do not believe how callous we have become, and how impotent to change the soul-and-body killing stresses inflicted by our government upon vulnerable people.
Marge - You are exactly right about all of this. I have to not let it cut my soul to the quick as I ponder the collective hatred. You have said exactly what happens. It is insane that we perpetuate the lack of support. Would we withhold treatment from a cancer patient if we knew it would work? Yeah. Well. With insurance companies having to approve everything, yes. And with an effing Supreme Court that would let a woman’s fallopian tube burst before it would allow her to end a pregnancy — subjecting her, her family, her existing children to the threat of losing her — we see exactly how dire the situation is. Old white men need to die or step aside and get their gavels and grubby paws out of our collective uteri. Thank you.
It's not just "old white men," if it were, we could out vote them. Tragically, it's also white women--of all ages.
AMEN SISTA!!
Thank you, Marge--for pointing out, ". . . how impotent to change the soul-and-body killing stresses inflicted by our government upon vulnerable people." I wonder if we are actually "impotent" or merely indifferent.
Thank you Carey.
Thank you Ms. Richardson for Beau Bryant's story. My three years as an Army dentist in Germany (1973-1976) were no sacrifice at all compared to the Beau Bryant's in our history, but I will think of Beau and all our greatest Americans each time I salute the passing flag in the Doylestown, Pa. Memorial Day Parade, tomorrow. By the way, I was named for Teddy Hoffman, my father's boyhood friend in Toronto, who was lost over the English Channel in WWII.
Warm wishes, Ted Croll
Thank you for this tender offering. Im grateful to pause and take in the true meaning of this weird holiday, that’s so easily about the start of summer and not about loss and grief and what might have been otherwise.
These are the stories that make the meaning of Memorial Day real, about real people who loved our way of life enough to sign up and play a real part in making our every day freedoms important enough that they risked their very lives for all of our futures. Too many paid the highest price, their very life and we must never forget them. Thank you for reminding us of Beau
Wonderful story. Of my paternal grandmother's three sons who served in WWII, the oldest, Vernon, did not come home. A sergeant in the Army's Ivy Division, he made it through D-Day though wounded near Cherbourg, only to be killed six months later in the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded the Bronze Star for heroic achievement. He was interred with other American soldiers in Luxembourg where his grave was adopted by a wonderful family. One day, the family found flowers on the grave from my grandparents. The family called the florist in Cumberland, MD, and obtained my grandparents' address; they wrote a letter and sent pictures of my uncle's grave. There began a friendship that would last decades. My uncle's body was eventually brought home and laid to rest on a Maryland hillside where his parents and sister later joined him. Now my children have his story.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful story, Leslie. Truly touched my heart.
You are a historian with a heart. Thanks for your work to provide us general readers without your expert's knowledge of American History such insights. // JB Colson, Professor Emeritus, School of Journalism and Fellow, Brisoe Center for American, The University of Texas at Austin. (My field has been photography and I also appreciate Buddy's contributions.)
My Dad was a Marine in WWII and my father in law , also a marine, was in the Korean War. They both saw heavy combat and lost fellow marines. They never complained and rarely spoke of their service or sacrifices but did speak of those we lost, and often reminded us that "freedom is not free" . They were among the lucky ones who returned home, married and had families. My wife and I and our siblings, children, in laws and grandchildren will always hear of our ancestors and their favorite words and what our military does for us. Memorial Day was always a somber day and there is a huge cost of our freedom and our teetering Democracy. Thanks to Ms Richardson for always helping understand today's events with relevant stories from the past. We will never forget those who served
Here’s to all the men and women who choose service and sacrifice.
“Holes in the social fabric.” Brilliant.
Thank you, Heather. In May of 1943 I was a 6-month old, living in the military housing at Dow Field with my mom and dad, who was an enlisted man, an accountant. He desperately wanted to fly but his eyesight wasn’t good enough. We lived there until the war ended. My earliest memories are of the airmen coming home from Europe, a constant series of bittersweet events. I remember visits to the barracks where the soldiers were always happy to give a piggyback ride to a “Yank kid”. I still remember all the words to the army air corps song, I remember our victory garden, and the blizzards in winter, when mom would take me to the PX on a small sled. The groceries got to ride back, I trundled along in a heavy wool snowsuit. Those were sober times, as even a very young child understood.
Thank you for sharing this story. We need to remember or most of us learn, that for every American military casualty, there were eight industrial casualties on the home front.
https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/machinery/1to8