Memorial Day 2007: Are we still a grateful nation?
This Memorial Day the living, as well as the dead, have weighted my soul and torn at my heart. Those who fell in past wars–that the rest of us could live free–and those who now fight in distant, dangerous Iraq, for the same reason, were on my mind constantly and in my prayers every moment of this solemn day. And never more so than during a quietly poignant ceremony held this morning in a small park in the center of a Texas retirement community called Sun City.
I am certain passersby would have noticed only a small gathering of elderly men and women clustered near a white stone wall formally inscribed to remind us of those who paid the ultimate price. As for me, I saw them as old warriors, soft now with paunches and besieged with aches, pains, and bad eyes. But eyes filled with tears as a moment of prayer gave way to the plaintiff notes of Taps played on a lone bugle. “Go to sleep, Go to sleep”.
The sad refrain echoed across the Texas hills and faded quickly to leave only a murmuring breeze and a light drizzle as the few who had gathered stood silent and straight, eyes gazing back to another time, another era. The moment was about remembering. And I found myself wondering who or what they saw; what they heard reaching through the long past years to touch them so profoundly and freeze them in place like so many brittle statues. Oh the stories they must have lived and the tales of valor and selflessness they can tell.
It must be the self-oriented times we live in now that so many Americans will causally ignore a day honoring those extraordinary men and women who gave their lives in defense of our nation. It’s hardly on the people’s minds, if it’s given a thought at all between grilling in the backyard, the lake, or the mall. Unless of course, you were there in places like Iwo Jima (WWII), The Chosin Reservoir (Korea), Khe Sanh (South Vietnam), and most recently, the deserts of Iraq and the terror of Baghdad. Then you know. You know because you walked the walk as well as talked the talk. You went, you did your duty, and you came back burdened with memories almost sacred in that they were so good and at once so bad.
But the rest of us? We can only guess at the nature of war, our conceptions (or misconceptions) shaped and amplified by movies like “Band of Brothers”, “A Bridge to Far”, or “Twelve O clock High”. Or maybe we gained a sense of it from our own fathers who never liked to talk about it, but did so on rare occasions. Still, we will never come close to knowing and understanding the nature of the glue that deeply and irrevocably binds men of arms.
Author William Manchester (best known for his three volumes on President John F. Kennedy) fully understood it. He served with the Marine Corps during WWII and participated in the battle for Okinawa in one of the most pivotal battles of the war: the 10 day non-stop fighting to wrest control of Sugar Loaf Hill from an entrenched Japanese force of thousands.
Much later in life he would characterize those fierce days of battle as the “central experience of my youth” and the singular moment that defined the balance of his life. Here is how Manchester described the battlefield experience of a lifetime. It is a graphic, account, but comes as close as anything I have read that may help the rest of us comprehend what warriors do that we may live free. In his own words….
All greenery had vanished; as far as one could see, heavy shell fire had denuded the scene of shrubbery. What was left resembled a cratered moonscape. But the craters were vanishing, because the rain had transformed the earth into a thin porridge—too thin even to dig foxholes. At night you lay on a poncho as a precaution against drowning during the barrages.
All night, every night, shells erupted close to shake the mud beneath you at the rate of five or six a minute. You could hear the cries of the dying but could do nothing. Japanese infiltration was always imminent, so the order of the day was to stay put. Any man who stood up was cut in half by machine guns manned by fellow marines.
By day the mud was hip deep; no vehicles could reach us. As you moved up the slope of the hill, artillery and mortar shells were bursting all around you, and if you were fortunate enough to reach the top, you encountered Japanese defenders, almost face to face, a few feet away. To me, they looked like badly wrapped brown paper parcels someone had soaked in a tub. Their eyes seemed glazed. So, I suppose did ours.
Japanese bayonets were fixed, ours weren’t. We used the knives, or, in my case, a .45 caliber revolver and M1 carbine. The mud beneath our feet was deeply veined with blood. I was slippery. Blood is very slippery. So you skidded around, in deep shock, fighting as best you could until one side outnumbered the other. The outnumbered side would withdraw for reinforcements and then counter attack.
During those ten days I ate half a candy bar. I couldn’t keep anything down. Everyone had dysentery, and this brings up an aspect of war even Robert Graves, Siegfried Sasson, Edmund Blunden, and Ernest Hemingway avoided. If you put more than a quarter million men in a line for three weeks, with no facilities for the disposal of human waste, you are going to confront a disgusting problem. We were fighting and sleeping in one vast cesspool. Mingled with that stench was another—the corrupt and corrupting odor of rotting human flesh.
Manchester left the war a few weeks after Sugar Loaf due to wounds received when a Japanese six inch rocket dropped on his position. A Marine buddy blocked the explosion with his body saving Manchester and leaving him with the indelible image of his friend’s viscera coating his own wounded body with slime and blood. He carried that image along with his friend’s bone slivers and Japanese shrapnel embedded near his heart until his death in 2004. It was the battlefield surgeon’s decision to leave in the bone and steel. Those bone fragments meant more to William Manchester than his medals.
From now on, I may have fun during the first two days of the Memorial Day weekend, but on Memorial Day itself I will always make time to participate in ceremonies remembering the men and women who fought and died in the service of our nation for each and every one of us. I will honor and remember, with somber appreciation, their gallantry while keeping in my torn heart those they left behind. Shouldn’t we all do that?
Aging and Raging
Posted: July 4, 2010 in Personal CommentaryToday the federal government certified me as officially “old”. My medicare card arrived. And, as if that were not enough, my new AARP membership turned up as well. Lucky me…a double dose of “the end is near”. Little wonder then that I have spent this gloomy day considering options.
On the one hand, I have this strange desire to go to the JC Penny’s store and buy plaid Bermuda shorts and long black knee-high socks to wear with my new sandals. Accessories will include a golf hat, new clubs and one of those little electric carts that glide silently up and down long grassy fairways in pursuit of a tiny white ball. And after the golfing, while the shadows grow long, I will eat very early…at a cafeteria somewhere…and go to bed at 8:00 pm…right after the news and weather on cable.
On the other hand, I cannot quit thinking about the poet Dylan Thomas and his now famous exhortations to his aging father:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Thomas’ poem (read all of it below) has become an enduring metaphor for transcending infirmities, resisting death, and milking life for all we can get out of it. That sure as hell sounds better to me than golf and mashed potatoes. Besides, I have always been good at raging—against or for all kinds of causes and things. I’m a good rager (not a word, but you get it) and a good milker too. So I lean naturally toward the Dylan Thomas approach
But there’s another factor that comes into play. You see I don’t really feel old. OK, that’s a white lie. Let me just say I don’t feel old in my mind. But any number of niggling things on or in my body hurt most of the time now. Some joints are stiff. I don’t sleep well. And I take pills for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Moreover, my short term memory is…what was I going to say here? I had it just moment ago.
Well never mind. Just consider this: The body ages, but the intellect and the spirit can remain young, curious, and adventurous. It is just a matter of personal will, mental exercise and deep resolve. Dig for it.
For all of us who are crossing the threshold into what is universally and euphemistically called the “autumn of our years”, there are choices. What will yours be? Mine will be, in the words of the poet, to “burn and rave at the close of day”until the “dying light” fades to black. I will not dwell on the aches, pains and infirmities sure to besiege me, but will stoically ignore them that I might do the following until my last breath is breathed:
Savor and drink in the amazing majesty of the earth and all its teaming, vibrant life. My God, the beauty.
Fight to restore our republic and protect liberty, justice, and the rule of law.
Love family and friends with unfaltering commitment.
Help others in need.
Pursue adventures, music, art, knowledge.
Indulge my boundless epicurean appetite for good food and drink, the good life.
Sing, dance and make music.
And what if that moment comes when I am bedridden with only a finger to wag, one ear that hears, and a still working nose. I will rage on by wagging the one working finger as if to say come here. And someone’s job will be to let me smell a rose with my nose and put some Willie in my ear that I might hear, yet again, “Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”
Parting shot. We’re not really old at all; we’re just getting ready to move on to what’s next…if you get my drift.
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”