OFF THE WIRE
Memorial Day was not imagined to honor veterans, or patriotism, or politicians or the sorts of war heroes who appear in television commercials for the United Services Automobile Association or the Navy Federal Credit Union
To be alive on Memorial Day is an
obligation – especially for veterans. Memorial Day is the brief moment
before our golden summers when it is our sacred duty to consider how we
came to be so lucky as to be here now in this increasingly flawed but
still great and free country. Memorial Day is when we must remember the
bodies.
This annual obligation to remember
emerged spontaneously in both the North and the South in the spring of
1864 – about nine or ten months after Gettysburg, in the midst of the
war that resulted when we took our principles so seriously that we went
to war with ourselves. Women in both the States of America joined into
groups to decorate the graves of the war’s dead. As many as 850,000 men
died in the War Between the States. Four-hundred-seventy-six thousand
men were wounded. One in 13 soldiers returned home missing at least one
limb. All but four members of the student body of the University of
Mississippi died. Most of them died at the same place at the same time,
on the last day of Gettysburg, during a human wave attack called
Pickett’s Charge.
Four hundred thousand men disappeared –
into the earth – because there was no one to claim their rotting bodies.
A few tens of thousands of German and Irish immigrants died of malaria
against which they had no immunity. The immigrants died because other
young men paid to have them fight and die for them. Fifty-one thousand
men died at Gettysburg. One in five of the Yankees or Confederates
deployed in that war died. Everyone knew someone who died, so the
obligation to remember was hardly a duty at all.
Forty-five hundred Americans died in the
American Revolution; 2,300 in the War of 1812; about 13,500 died in
the Mexican War – the war that created the American Southwest; and
another 2,500 died in the Spanish American War in Cuba and the
Philippines. One-hundred-sixteen-thousand-five-hundred-sixteen died in
the First World War and another 405,399 in the following World War –
about one in every 40 deployments in both those wars.
Thirty-six-thousand-five-hundred-seventy-four died in Korea;.
Fifty-eight-thousand-two-hundred-nine died in Vietnam – about one in
every 58 deployed. Three-hundred-eighty-three died in the Gulf War and
6,845 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The casualties
for the war George W. Bush started amount to about one death for every
380 deployments which means that the longest war in American History is
also a war in which our soldiers have been unlikely to know someone who
actually died. That may be a mixed blessing.
If you have been in a war you understand
that they are not at all as they are usually dramatized. They are much
bigger and louder. They are muddy and your rifle jams. The food is bad
and all the colonels are insane. And then some kid you know runs past
engulfed in flames. They are all about as glorious as a hurricane. There
is no wisdom to be gained from them.
The only wisdom to be gained is in
recollecting the bodies. Memorial Day is when we are morally obliged to
take a few moments to do that.
Enjoy your ride. Enjoy your barbecue. That is why they died. Try to remain handcuff free. That is also why they died.
