Steve Mensing, Editor
♦Every year, Memorial Day is marked in just about every hamlet, town, and city in the United States. This day commemorates the lives of courageous men and women who perished fighting for our country and freedoms. Sometimes men and women suffered because their ”call to duty” was the product of political deceptiveness and the shallow disregard of war’s future consequences. It doesn’t matter how our men and women came to make the ultimate sacrifice, these courageous men and women followed duty’s call.
Sometimes we forget or give little attention to the men and women who perished in combat, prisoner of war camps, or died slowly and painfully to life as the result of war trauma. Memorial Day, sadly exists as a thoughtless habit for some who attend BBQs, drink too much beer, or passively watch a parade of old salts and elderly gentleman wearing VFW hats, walking behind a military vehicles and waving their canes at the crowds.
Memorial Day ought to be a time of thoughtful recollection and special thanks for these countless departed souls who are buried in unmarked graves or lay beneath simple wooden crosses, some swallowed up by Pacific jungles, or in Europe and the Middle East. Honoring Memorial Day with meaning might be accomplished through visiting a military cemetery or memorial service or spending time engrossed in the raw footage of war documentaries or reading first person narratives of battlefields and wars at sea. Acknowledging war and its often reluctant heroes and their harsh stories is a step closer to being in their boots. Maybe this is the best non-combatants can do. Nothing comes close to being in an all-out fire fight or feeling the jarring concussions of having your position rocketed or pulverized by 2,000 lb. bombs. Or being trapped below deck in an oily smoke filled corridor of a sinking vessel.
War is Hell. Lest we forget.
Over 27 years ago, I worked as a counseling intern in the “Detox Unit” at the West Philadelphia Veteran’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Here I heard many firsthand accounts of veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and Nam. These raw stories, sometimes reluctantly told because of the fear they evoked, brought home the full adrenalin terror, blind courage, and fighting-for-your-buddies survival in most horrific circumstances. Combat veterans truly made sacrifices of life and limb and, frequently, a lifetime of mental health. Their families, even though separated by distance, were right there with them. Even long after they received the final word from the War Department.
War stories prove very uncomfortable for many to tell — they are harrowing and often extremely painful, but I’d advise folks to listen to them and know the visceral facts of war so you may know our forgotten heroes.
Can you imagine experiencing the raw fear and sweat of hunkering down in a forward machine gun nest near the Yalu River and seeing a “human wave” of thousands upon thousands of the Chinese Regular Army advancing toward your side of the river? I won’t describe the condition of your underwear or your dry-mouthed prayers prior to the “human wave” turning East along the Yalu. If you were there, you would’ve known what it felt like to almost catch your everlasting lunch. Such memories remain etched in a soldiers consciousness and are ready to spring from its dark box in early waking. Four o’clock AM adrenalin dreams and cold sweats.
I once met an elderly former defender of Corregidor in the Philippines. His story involved surviving malaria, dysentery, starvation at Japanese prisoner of war camps, and the constant risk of being bayoneted or shot if he failed to keep up. So it was during the infamous Bataan Death March and in the crowded hold of a Japanese coal ship bound for Manchuria. The toughest part lay ahead as a slave laborer in steel factory. Surviving this ordeal, he returned stateside to limp about Baltimore and Philly as a member of urban “bottle gangs” to drink away his PTSD-laced memories. Fill in the missing blanks in his story and know what its like to go to sleep every night among the dead and the dying. We’re not being the least dramatic here — just telling you what went down.
Imagine what it was like in the final hours of the burning USS Yorktown as it shuddered and went down in shark-infested waters. Can you viscerally comprehend the rapid bark of automatic weapons in a rice paddy during the heat of a fire fight where most of your buddies caught it and you’re among the few remaining? The VC is tightening their ring around you. Or you returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with memories you don’t want to touch, and yet frequently they get re-stimulated when you hear odd and unsettling sounds in your environment.
For those fresh from combat, just about every day is a memorial day where you can’t get scenes and missing comrades out of your head.
This Memorial Day, take time to remember those men and women who stepped up and did not make it back. It would give a fuller meaning to why they fought and died. Remember Memorial Day and pay your respects.
