Today is a national holiday in America. It used to be called “Decoration Day” until Congress standardized the holiday as “Memorial Day” in 1971. In my childhood, it was about parades down Main Street, American flags and food. Most of the houses in my neighborhood flew the flag from a bracket over their garage or outside their front door.
The local pools opened on Memorial Day though the water temperature was teeth-rattling cold for at least a month. Summer didn’t officially start for another month but in actuality, it was the unofficial start of summer. School was almost over. Students and teachers were ready for a break from each other.
School usually ended by the second week of June unless there had been an unusually harsh winter and too many days had been lost because of snow and ice. Those years, school lasted a few agonizing days longer.
Memorial Day though brought the promise of impending freedom for us kids. It meant something different for many of the adults. Most of the fathers of the children I grew up with had been in World War II. I don’t think I fully understood what Memorial Day was memorializing until I was well into my adulthood.
I had learned about America’s wars in school, of course, and how American soldiers had saved Europe twice from the tyranny of the Hun. My father was in WWII for nearly four years but he seldom talked about his experiences. This was the same for other military veterans. It wasn’t until many years later when I was working with soldiers from a different war that I began to understand something about military service.
In my youth, the sacrifice that military members made in our wars wasn’t all that personal. It was parades, flags, bands, hotdogs, fried chicken, handmade ice cream and Aunt Lucille’s cherry pies. Death and loss were abstract notions detached from the bands and bare-legged majorettes twirling polished chrome batons with bulbous white rubber tips up into the sun.
I think the first time the real cost of war hit me me was when I visited the U.S cemetery in Luxembourg when I was a student there. It seems ironic now that I had to come several thousand miles from my home to understand what war meant. I was of draft age and the U.S. was at war once again, this time in the small country of Viet Nam. It was there in that cemetery with its sea of white crosses and Stars of David that the abstract understanding I had of war became much more real and personal. That beautifully manicured expanse with lush green grass crisscrossing between the gleaming headstones was the final resting place of thousands of young men, most of whom were about my age when their life, their future stopped.The glossy veneer of war from past Memorial Days began to be scraped away. War wasn’t just Souza marches and picnics in the park. It was also about lives violently cut short.
The next experience that brought brought me a vivid encounter with war was when I worked for the Red Cross at Ground Zero in New York City following the attacks on the World Trade Center. The people who lost their lives on that day weren’t soldiers but they were casualties of the war that followed for the next 21 years.
No doubt it was the Memorial Days of my youth, the cemetery in Luxembourg and working at Ground Zero that led me to my work of the past sixteen years with the U.S. military as a Mental Health Counselor. From these experiences, I have learned that what is behind the curtain of war is the hard, unavoidable truth that war is more about loss than victory. The cost of war is so many times greater than the official accounting. War is like a huge boulder thrown into a tiny lake. The ripple effects go on long after the initial big splash.
It could be argued that wars seldom end. They may lie dormant, sometimes for a very long time, only to erupt when the underlying conditions in the substrata of history find their way to the surface. This appears to be the case in the Ukraine currently. The forces that have historically fomented political, economic and social discord have re-energized from the not completely extinct ashes of WWII.
Soldiers may initially go to war for patriotic reasons. They are attracted by being part of a cause greater than themselves. Once at war, soldiers find that what attracted them also repulses them. They enter into a duality that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. When I was working with combat soldiers in the Iraq War, I heard many say that when they were downrange (deployed) all they could think about was going home and when they were home all they could think about was going back downrange.
I have learned that war is addictive and detestable. It is a mass of contradictions. It can give you an intense feeling that you have great meaning and purpose in life and simultaneously see that war is only about death, destruction and loss. It solves the daily existential question of what I will do with my life while also showing you that what you are doing matters little in the grand scheme of life. War takes away your tomorrows and intensifies your now.
When the war in Afghanistan officially ended this year, I found myself deeply depressed, not because the war had ended but because of all the loss I had witnessed. All the pain and suffering of soldiers and their families I had seen over the past sixteen years came back to me. I had attended so many memorial services for soldiers who died in the war, by their own hand, by reckless driving seeking the adrenalin high they had gotten used to and substance abuse.
It all seemed so senseless. What brought me out of my grief, because that was what was underlying my depression, was a conversation I had with a senior officer who had served multiple deployments. I had expressed to him my sadness at all the loss and how the war seemed to have had no meaning or real purpose. His response was, “Yes, but we did our duty.”
This may seem hollow or trite to some people but to me who has lived, worked, counseled and sat beside soldiers, sailors, marines, Red Cross workers, firemen, police personnel and airmen in dining halls around the world, I understand that service above self means something. Anyone who has gone beyond the minimum for their students, their patients, their community, their country knows something of what this feels like.
Service does not make everything one does right and just but it does mean we haven’t lived for just our own needs and wants. Service before self means we did our duty. We did what we thought was right. We gave of ourselves for what we believed was a higher cause. Some things are worth fighting for and risking dying for. Democracy is. Freedom is. This is why we have Memorial Day
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