On Memorial Day

I don’t remember when I stopped enjoying Memorial Day. For most of my life it was the unofficial start of summer, and as a kid growing up in Western Pennsylvania, where the school year ended the first week in June, it carried with it the knowledge that school would soon be over.

            I don’t suppose I gave Memorial Day much thought. It just was. I am old enough to remember when it was called “Decoration Day,” a symbolic day in American history in which family members decorated the graves of their loved ones killed in the Civil War. In 1966 the name was officially changed to Memorial Day, and in 1971 it became a national holiday.

            I spent seven years in the Army, the last three as an Army nurse. In May 1970 I spent Memorial Day doing what I did six out of the other seven days of the week: working on a neurosurgical intensive care unit at a hospital in Vietnam. I don’t remember pausing to think of the men who had given their lives in this seemingly useless cause. We were in the middle of “The Cambodian Incursion,” a joint military operation involving South Vietnamese and American soldiers, in a failed attempt to eradicate the North Vietnamese from neutral Cambodia. We were too busy.

I doubt I have ever worked as hard as I did the two months we were in Cambodia. My hospital was one of the closest to the Cambodian border and the “whomp, whomp, whomp” of helicopters bringing the wounded to our hospital seemed endless. But we must have done a good job; the appropriate panel of “The Wall” bears the names of only ten men killed in action in May 1970.

I have always been proud I served in Vietnam. It was the worst, the best, and the longest year of my life rolled into one. I had no idea how disastrous the accident aboard “Apollo 13” was until I saw the movie. A serious sports fan, I could not tell you who won either the World Series or the Super Bowl. They simply were not on my radar screen. Young men with devastating wounds were.

When I came home I was not treated as a pariah. I was more a curiosity, if that, and a month after my plane touched down in San Francisco I was at Ft Knox, KY, where being a war veteran was nothing special.

Once in the 1990s, in a rather “in your face” response to the VFW’s refusal to welcome women veterans into its regular ranks, I marched, at the invitation of the post commander, with the men in our town’s very short but nevertheless touching Memorial Day Parade.  The parade was so short no one could figure out why I was with them and not with the women’s auxiliary, or the Vietnam Veterans of America, a group I have never been particularly interested in joining.

So why, do I feel the way I do about Memorial Day? Somehow, in a way I don’t entirely understand, I have come to dislike the “juice” of Memorial Day. It is not a day for fly-overs, or baseball teams wearing camouflage uniforms, or people hyperventilating while singing “God Bless America.” It is a day to remember, not just any Veteran, but those who died because of their war service. Men like NFL Player Pat Tillman, or my high school classmates Freddie Highberger and Ed Ginter, or the brother of my classmate Puddie Stratka, who died of Agent Orange exposure, or the father-in-law of another classmate, Marcie Woods, who died somewhere in Europe in the spring of 1945, a few days before the man who would become her husband was born.

If we really want to honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice we will stop asking them to give it. We will find a way to settle our differences, no matter how just warring may seem. We will remember the dead with more than parades and picnics. And, I suppose, a lot of people like me will cry.