Memorial Day for me is a lifetime event that doesn’t end with just one day of recognition and memory.
I have a diary.
Many Americans will pause, on this day, which is celebrated on the last Monday of May to offer ‘thanks’ for those who have died in the military representing this country.
Sharpsburg has celebrated, with honor, this event for the last 159 years with a parade, wreath laying ceremony, patriotic speeches and flags that line main street.
The nearby Antietam battlefield is a ‘humble’ reminder of wars and those many atrocities experienced by soldiers.
People don’t often think of war these days or appreciate those who have served, fought and died for our country.
If you want to know what some soldiers have thought of wars, you should read ‘War Letters’ by Andrew Carroll and consider:
At Antietam ~ Major William Child, a surgeon with the New Hampshire Volunteers who treated injured soldiers in a makeshift hospital at Smoketown near Keedysville wrote to his wife ~
‘No one can begin to estimate the amount of agony after a great battle. We win the battle; the masses rejoice, but if all could see the thousands of poor sufferings, dying men their rejoicing would turn to weeping.’
A glimpse of war in our own backyard
World War I ~ Lt. Lewis Plush wrote home in 1919; ‘Men fought to kill, to maim, to destroy, he wrote. Some return home, others remain behind forever on the fields of great sacrifice.
World War II ~ Pvt. Paul Curtis on May 28, 1944, describes the life of a soldier: ‘Take a combination of fear, anger, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, disgust, loneliness, homesickness and wrap that all up in one reaction and you might approach the feelings of a soldier. ‘Without faith, I don’t see how anyone could stand this,’ he wrote.
Curtis was killed three days later. War dead in WW II numbered about 410,000, with 671,278 wounded. Maybe we should have a holiday for the wounded too.
Korea ~ some 36,000 of our military would be killed, with another 240,000 wounded. Leon wrote his lady friend, ‘Dear Babe, you tried to let me down easy, ‘Be careful you tell me, I almost laughed out loud.’
Two days later, Leon was killed as he charged a North Korean machine gun nest.
Vietnam ~ Over 58,000 soldiers were killed in this war with another 150,000 or so wounded; few ‘welcome home’ signs were seen when this war ended on April 30, 1975. Over 1,566 American soldiers are still ‘unaccounted for’ in Southeast Asia.
Orville Lee Knight, a Dargan lad and childhood friend, wrote his wife Kathy a letter from Vietnam. He also sent her a black coat in the mail which probably summed up his predicament in this war:
“When I die, I’ll go to heaven, because I’ve spent my time in hell.” On April 8, 1969, the same day his daughter Samantha was being baptized at a local church, her father stepped on a booby trap in Bien Hoa province and left hell for heaven.
Orville Lee is buried in the Keedysville, Maryland, cemetery.
Wars like Vietnam should be avoided by our political friends. It is a tragedy to see such good and honorable young men and women patriots sent to their slaughter and grave for a ‘foolhardy’ decision.
Iraq War (2003-2011) ~ In Iraq we lost over 4,000 American soldiers, and one writer suggested that 4,000 caskets laid end to end would stretch for five miles, that distance from my home in Antietam Furnace to the town of Sharpsburg; a peculiar method for measuring our dead soldiers.
Many other skirmishes and conflicts have resulted in American deaths.
On this Memorial Day, my diary is full of memories; perhaps yours is too.
In closing I would like to share a section of Carl Sandburg’s poem ‘The People, Yes’ as follows:
‘The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,
What are those?
Soldiers (replied the old man)
What are soldiers? (she asked)
They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can.
The girl held still and studied.
‘Do you know….I know something (she said)
Yes, what do you know (asked the old man)
‘Sometimes they’ll give a war and nobody will come, she replied.
And I too would offer up this closing prayer ~
Dear God, ‘Sometimes they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
‘All gave some, some gave all.”
Amen. RIP. We love you!
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