From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
--Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
L OOKING at the calendar, Memorial Day is unlike any other holiday on the books. We don't take a day off work to recognize the day that George Washington or Abraham Lincoln died. We celebrate Jan. 15, not April 4.
Easter can be a solemn event, but only the few days before--because in the morning light of that Sunday, churches ring out with Hallelujah! Hallelujah! as we celebrate He who has risen.
The only way that Thanksgiving is a downer is after the meal, when people start moving in slow motion toward the couch and fall asleep in front of a good football game. Christmas is the favorite, with gifts and wrapping and more football. New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are celebrations with drink and noise--and football.
Veterans Day is the closest to Memorial Day, as it celebrates those in uniform. But Veterans Day celebrates everybody who honorably served in the United States military. Memorial Day is set aside for those who died in service.
Today is a day for visiting graves. It has a different feel. And should have.
During a war, death is dealt with. The grunts know. Which is why they start singing about it in cadences during training. We are reminded of the motto of the 98th Field Artillery Battalion in World War II: Comparing themselves to the mules that carried their equipment, they said, about themselves: "No pride of ancestry, no hope of posterity."
Before the Bataan Death March, when American and Filipino soldiers were still fighting to hold ground against the Japanese, the cadence went like this:
We're the battling bastards of Bataan,
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces.
And nobody gives a damn.
The American Navy lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. So the battling bastards of Bataan couldn't be resupplied. Their orders: Fight until you can't. Some died in place. Some died later during the march. Some died operating as guerillas in the jungle. Some died after liberation, having lost so much physically and mentally during their imprisonment.
Today we set aside to remember them. And all those who died in military service to this country.
Yes, the holiday has a different feel.
M any families have a similar story: A young man, in the prime of life, was taken away by the U.S. Navy. He went missing in combat after his ship was damaged in the early 1940s. We never got the full story. After all those years, military correspondence with the family was lost. Only the memories of the very old kept the story alive.
But memories are notoriously unreliable. At first, the kids were confused because a grandparent insisted the war was in Korea instead of WWII. They figured it out later, and blamed the death on a Japanese sub.
The remembered boy who went into the Navy doesn't have a grave. But we won't forget to pass the story to the younger generation today--every chance we get.
Wars continue to this day, and the rest of us need those who stand on the wall. Mankind's hubris continues to this day. The history books and newspaper clippings tell us that Americans were so swaggering at one point that we named a war The War to End All Wars. Something tells us we won't make that mistake again.
But after great pain comes a three-day weekend. That's how Americans do things. Labor Day gives us a three-day weekend, too, but don't forget the pain that came as Labor tried to find its place in America. And would, but only after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, protests against 12-hour work days, and opposition against union busting.
Thanksgiving gives us a four-day weekend, but lest we forget, first came the great pain that nearly starved those newly arrived on these shores, or almost killed the nation in the crib during the Late Unpleasantness of the 1860s.
Today, another great pain has given many Americans this Monday off work. It's the American way. Give 'em a happy ending every time.
How American, how all-American, how America. Today we honor those who've given their lives to defend their country, those killed in action or behind where the action was supposed to be. After all, in wars these days, how can you tell where the lines are on the battlefield? The whole point of today's enemy is to get behind whatever lines might be out there and do their damage. Then fade back into the crowd.
Uniforms? The Geneva Convention? Those are for winners. Losers like today's enemy need to be a little more cunning. As P.J. O'Rourke once noted, only losers hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. Winners have air forces.
We pause today to remember those who are beyond it all now. And who were denied the best parts of life. Who died, many in their prime, so the rest of us could barbecue and watch baseball games today.
And you know what? We doubt they'd want it any other way.
A s somber as this holiday is, the men and women who went into battle (or maybe just put on the uniform and were shot at a recruiting center in Little Rock), probably wouldn't begrudge the rest of us for making the most of it. That is, to live. To be.
The kind of people who put on the uniform aren't usually the kind of people who'd demand the whole country stop and sob for them on a holiday. They were selfless. Not completely, of course, for no human is.
But it takes a whole heaping helping of selflessness to stay in the barracks in the first place as a drill sergeant screams bloody murder because your class-A buttons weren't polished. (Although drill sergeants know: The private who doesn't shine his buttons is the private who doesn't dig the grenade sump, and gets his buddies killed.) The dead are past it all now. Even those who didn't make it to the prime of life, or to the current legal drinking age. Doubtless there are those in Arkansas reading this today who have lost loved ones in service in the near past, and will use part of this day to quietly cry over a grave.
For those who've sacrificed the most for their country over the centuries, we imagine they'd prefer it if we all saluted at the parade today, then went on to live. And laugh. And eat, drink and be merry. And watch the baseball game. And enjoy the grandkids. And do all the things that they would do.
And just be. After all, they gave everything, so that we could.