Prologue - Why Say Anything?
Memorial Day comes and goes and each year I increasingly make a point of ignoring it - to the extent that's possible in the current performative culture. I mean no disrespect to my fellow veterans or to the warriors who came before us and gave their “last, full measure of devotion.” Indeed, I come not to bury, but to praise them. They truly were honorable men who, through no fault of their own, served a country that now performs the patriotic rituals a little too hard, with the zeal possible only to those who know nothing of the principles that animated those sacrifices. I have no use for yellow ribbon magnets on minivans or lying sociopaths uttering banal phrases and inanities while placing wreaths on the graves of my ancestors, my friends... my advance party across the Styx.
Each year, however, my abstention carries with it no small measure of guilt and regret. I want to rail at the world, to use my grief like mjølnir on the heads of all those publicly wailing, gnashing, and rending their garments, unaware of their theft from the Dead - from My Dead, the eidolons of my (formerly) youthful male aspirations to all that is Right and Good in martial prowess and chivalric bearing.
I used to be a stickler about the differences between Memorial Day in May, honoring those who died in this Country’s Wars, and Veteran’s Day in November, honoring those who survived the same. The legalism gave me another minutiae of ‘knowledge’ that I could break out on the Unknowing if circumstance necessitated. The problems with this peculiar disjunction -between the days honoring the Nation’s War-Dead and its War-Living, on opposite sides of the calendar and seasons - didn’t hit me until recently. What happened is that I aged and it became impossible for me to segregate my War Dead from my Peacetime Dead from my own Post-War Living, out-surviving so many colleagues and friends. Any marginally competent psychologist or veteran's counselor can describe the Survivor’s Guilt that haunts those who survive a rocket attack or roadside bomb alongside others who do not.
And then there are the guys (it’s almost always men among veterans) who die by their own hand. Where do they stand in the hallowed halls of Valhalla? Several mentors and friends - personal heroes, men I looked up to, but also had the fortune to serve alongside and have personal relationships with... great men, great friends, and great leaders - who were unfortunately great in the manner of Hemingway.
Is there a great soul - or any worthy soul at all - that isn’t tortured by this Earthly journey?
With each passing year, I’ve watched the military I retired from - and the Nation itself - transmogrifying into some hideous monster, its institutions used as weapons against political opponents, corruption so rampant and obvious that it not only draws neither public derision nor opprobrium, but the perpetrators bask in reward and esteem, even when caught being corrupt... Nowadays, especially when they’re caught being corrupt. I see the politicians uttering pablum over my friends’ graves while they make the public obeisances - words that have zero meaning to them - and I can’t help but ask, “Is this what they died for? Did Nate and Brian really die on a rooftop in Afghanistan for Covid lockdowns? What did Doug really die in an alley in Iraq for? Mike, Swab, Nuts - for what did they give their last breath?”
In an effort to answer that question, I provide my own memorial to those who still walk the corridors of my heart. Some living, some dead, all happy warriors who wore the yoke with a wry smile.
In the Beginning...
...Was my grandfather, my father’s father. I still believe the best piece of writing I’ve ever done is this one about him shortly after his passing. It may not be my best writing objectively; I recognize that I can’t separate my love for the man from my attempt to eulogize him. What’s ironic is that he wasn’t the dominant male figure in my life. My grandfather didn’t, for example, raise me - as happens with some kids by unfortunate circumstance. And if every word I ever heard him speak was put to paper, I doubt those words would number as many as there are in the piece I wrote about him. He lived, but I wrote, trying to capture some small measure of the context that made him the keystone of our family and a profoundly Good Man.
He never spoke - never to me, anyway, though Dad has a couple of tales - of the time Pepe spent carrying a bazooka into Fortress Europe, nor of the horrors when his unit liberated a death camp as the war ground to its inevitable end, the Germans fleeing back from the U.S. advance after the (barely) failed final offensive that would come to be known as the “Battle of the Bulge.” He could stand at the front door in silence for what seemed an eternity to my fidgety young self, his blue eyes somewhere else, looking out at the trees in the yard. My mind’s eye can conjure him with the smoke from his pipe curling up over his head, the smell of Captain Black Apple Spice wafting to my nose, while the leaves go from green to autumnal orange, to dead and scattered on the lawn, to buried under the rain’s onslaught, then winter’s snow, ice, March’s muddy slush, then slushy mud, then back to their rebirth in yellow... and there stands Pépé, the occasional rock to his heels, a brief, deliberate motion to recharge his pipe, his eyes lighting up when he turns the whole of his attention on you, his blue eyes twinkling.
Hellooo, my boy!
He made it to 98, so I don’t know if he’s really supposed to get his due this weekend. But he’s gone now and I know something of him died between December of ‘44 and the War’s end. They all said it; those who knew him before, quietly, in whispers and with respect: “Ohhh, Daddy changed... he was different when he came back.” Uncle Babe - my grandfather’s brother Herman, but he didn’t like the name and everyone knew him as Babe - came back with a steel plate in his head that he hid with a hat even indoors, (a breach of etiquette that only I was dumb enough to ask about), but all of his wits, fortunately. My reward for the childhood curiosity was to get to see the chunk of skull that was missing from his giant bald pate, and simultaneously try to hide my youthful horror. But Uncle Babe had a big laugh and a broad, easy smile to go with the familial blue eyes that prevailed even among the dark-haired members of my father’s father’s clan.
If my grandfather and his brother aren’t exactly My war dead, they’re progenitors to all of the Warriors I knew and admired who populate the list on my heart, and I’ve no doubt not that none of them suffer from the association, even if it’s only in my head.
Rest in peace. I hope to see you again and that I may be welcomed at your table.
It is so. That we who have heard are Country calling are killing ourselves at the rapid rate. We are forced to listen to “the banal” catechism of “thank you for service” knowing they don’t mean it, don’t know us, don’t care and hide behind gated walls and tell us to sacrifice more. For them. This weekend and Vereran’s Day become more and more immeasurably sad, but then I recall those infamous words “we few, we happy few….” Yes the castrated men of America hold their honor cheap, but we don’t…we don’t.
This bit of writing that you have posted has really hit home and for a moment I don’t feel so alone in my stand.
Semper Fidelis