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| The national D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia |
They call it Memorial Day here, but I wonder why. Seems a lot of folks know it has something to do with the military, but couldn’t tell, or do not remember, what differentiates it from Veteran’s Day. The latter is all the living who serve now or have served in our nation’s armed services. The former, the one we have this weekend, is for those who gave their lives in that service. It seems both are worth remembering, and easy to forget.
My family has not generally been in the military, though my cousin’s son is now in the Air Force. Rather than a lack of willingness, I think it reflects our chronological dissonance. My grandfathers, for example, were born in 1910 and 1911. They were too young for World War I and too old for World War II.
By the time the draft kicked in for Vietnam, my dad was already thirty, six years married with two kids, and a doctoral student to boot. That’s a whole century’s wars that we missed – or more accurately, missed us. I am not complaining. The one that was hardest to miss was in the previous century, and we know that Randolph Foster Hageman from my dad’s mom’s Ohio family served until discharged due to deafness, which had some causal root in the din at Gettysburg.
By the time our modern days of “forever war” rolled around, my own peers and my own generation were eligible and involved, but the numbers in uniformed service much smaller overall even as the days and years of fighting grew without ceasing. My high-school buddy Tommy Pate had decided to enlist a year or so before the first Gulf War, and he got a trip to ‘the sandbox’ for explosive ordinance disposal, the mere thought of which made me cringe. Tommy made it home with limbs and digits intact. The most life-threatening thing I had to do was drive the construction zones of the reconfiguration of the I-495/I-395/I-95 “mixmaster” interchange in Virginia on my way to work overnight in support of our troops and fliers. I slept in my own bed every day from noon to dinnertime; that hardly counts in the same category of service.
Everybody gets older, and we all know from personal acquaintance and personal experience that loss of memory brings loss of identity. Failure to remember who did what for us and for our nation similarly deprives us of self-awareness and self-understanding. As our nation approaches two-hundred fifty, are there signs of senile dementia, or worse, societal Alzheimer’s?
As you pause to look at the crowds around us clamoring for this or that, the rancor and recrimination that has spilled into our streets and squares, a check of memory may provide helpful context. Remember that before that relatively small, relatively wealthy, and relatively educated group of men resolved to hang together lest they all hang separately, such a nation, and such government had never been known. Remember it could be otherwise, and remember that it always and everywhere had been otherwise. The memory may prompt an expectation and understanding, that relinquishing what makes ours the way it is will certainly invite the return of one of those other ways, the bad ones.
Mixed up in our memories and movies are the real lives of real people we ourselves may not have known and may ourselves not have been related to who stepped forward freely and served willingly and at the price of their lives made our lives better, made our lives possible.
If you cannot remember, write it down. If you want everybody to remember, write it in stone. That makes it a Memorial, and this is the day for it. Remember.
Monsignor Smith
