Let's put aside our political differences for a day and join hands in remembering our fallen Brothers and Sisters.
The silence is broken only by the shuffling of the old men’s feet as they hobble forward on creaking knees, their gnarled, arthritic hands tenuously grasping a funeral wreath which they place in the designated spot, then snap to attention as well as their bowed backs will allow. They slowly raise their hands to their eyebrows in a well-remembered salute to their fallen brothers. These old men, Veteran’s of long-ago wars, each wearing a funny looking little hat shaped like a pup-tent, are serious about this. The small crowd of on-lookers is quiet and somber in reverence as the tinny tones of “Taps” blares out from a borrowed boom-box. Outside the cemetery, traffic whizzes by on its way to the lake.
This scene will be repeated thousands of times this weekend, all over America, as we pause to honor our war dead. With ceremonies, speeches, music, parades, we’ll take account of what our liberty has cost. Some will attend events like this, most won’t. Some won’t even think about the meaning of Memorial Day, but most will.
But what, or more accurately, who are we honoring? To the on-lookers, it’s the millions who have perished in defense of our freedoms and their emotions are genuine. Awestruck by the numbers, some will shed actual tears of grief and thankfulness for those unknown and un-named heroes, many of whom still lie in foreign soil. Their gratitude is real and their presence here is ample proof that they have not forgotten. Yet, it is strikingly impersonal to them, though they cannot be faulted for that. Most are not Veteran’s themselves, fewer still have actually heard the sound of death as it snaps by their ears during a firefight, or felt the whole-body thud of a deadly explosion at close range. They have never crouched over a dying comrade, trying desperately to find the source of all that blood, never had to inventory the personal effects of that man who never came back from patrol, never wrestled over the wording of the awful letter to his family. They’ve seen it in movies, they understand the implications, but they have no direct, personal frame of reference on which to hang today’s ceremonies.
That’s not so for those old men. To them, it’s far too personal. They’ve seen the elephant, felt the horror, washed another mans brains from their own face. To them, it’s not about honoring war dead in the abstract, but about real, live individuals; people they knew personally, men and women they lived with, fought with, cried with. The faces are there before their eyes as they go through the motions of laying the wreath and saluting. The dead pass before them, as if on parade, and while the crowd sees the ceremony, the old men see the death and feel the pain of loss.
How can that difference in perceptions between those old Veteran’s and the crowd of well-wishers be bridged? How can the old men make those who don’t know the awfulness of war understand? What could they say to make it all come clear in an instant, to reveal the true value and the true horror of what they’re all commemorating? Perhaps it can’t be done. Maybe it’s beyond the ability of any language to communicate.
Or, maybe it can be done by an introduction:
Crowd of honest, well-meaning people, let me introduce you to one of my faces. It’s a fairly pleasant face, not particularly handsome, but not ugly either. It’s a thin face, darkened by the sun and filth which turned each man in that place a deep, chestnut brown, more dirt than flesh. It’s a face with merry, laughing eyes which are somehow far, far too old for the face, as if they’d been lifted from some old grandpa and planted below the brow of this nineteen year old dead man. We see him just before he died and after more than nine months in the war, so he’s both young and terribly old at the same time. War does that to young men, you know. That’s why his eyes appear so old. But, he’s alive when we see him now, as he was alive then, but we know that face is now more than 41 years in the grave. He’s been dead now longer than he lived, but that doesn’t matter to us right now.
We see him smiling, and note the single false front tooth which he would pull out and stick in a shirt pocket whenever he thought it appropriate. We hear his voice as he chats merrily about the whore he met on R&R in Bangkok and plans to marry when he gets out of the Army. We see his innocent blindness to the laughter of his friends about that, his complete dedication and love for that nameless rent-a-girl with whom he found the comfort he so desperately needed to forget the madness of Vietnam, if even for a week or two. We can sympathize with his longing to recapture that feeling once again, but can’t imagine why he would take it that far!
But, he’s a good man, a good soldier, a teenager thrust into things far beyond his ability to control, but he’s adapted well enough to survive and that’s enough. And, he cares for the men of his platoon, his company, with a fervor only matched by those other men and rarely found anywhere outside of combat. He can be as brutal, as hard-hearted, as uncaring, unemotional and mean to the enemy as anyone else, but he’s reserved enough of his pre-war goodness of heart to go out of his way to help a new guy get squared away, to help him sort through the endless piles of Army junk and pick out only that which he will actually NEED to carry on his back. That new guy was me and I will be forever in his debt. Had he not taken the time, I might have been lost for want of that extra bandolier of ammunition or those other canteens which I didn’t know I could get.
We recall his attitude as much as we do his face. He was among that generation of soldiers who didn’t take to authority very easily. Rebellious, outspoken, sensitive to injustice, he was a product of his times, yet he was a good man, dependable in a fight and always up for a joke. A strutting, parade-ground marionette? Not hardly. A man on whom you could trust your life? Yes, absolutely. To me, that makes him a soldier, a man, to be admired.
See him now, when the First Sergeant thought his hair was too long while in from the bush on stand down? See how he, and another guy known as “Tiny,” grumbled their way to the barber and returned, only to be told it was still too long? See his anger? See his determination to make a statement? Notice how he’s smiling and winking when he comes back the second time with the prettiest Mohawk haircut you ever saw, precisely 2 inches long as the regulations require. Can you hear the First Sergeant explode? Yes, it’s hard to hear since they’re down in one of those underground bunkers where we lived like rats while on the firebase, but the message is clear. He made his statement, though it cost him an Article 15 for Defacing Government Property. He didn’t care.
Oh, but now, we see him a little later and now we come to the moment which this ceremony we’re all involved in is supposed to honor. We come to the moment of death for Specialist Fourth Class James R. Stout.
It happens on a little firebase called LZ Rawhide, west of Danang in the broad valley of the Song Vu Ghia river. We’ve been here a couple of days already, our mission to strengthen the base defenses in anticipation of May Day forgotten under a hail of 122mm Katyusha rockets and mortars. We don’t care about the mission as much as we care about staying alive, care about putting more mines and trip flares in the wire because we KNOW we’ll be hit tonight. Intelligence says to expect it and we know the enemy has moved in and occupied the little villages which ring this tiny hill, only 65 ft above sea level and not more than a few hundred yards long. We know this because we sat in our bunkers last night and heard them killing people, saw them burning houses and were powerless to stop it. We watched in awe as the South Vietnamese base down the road was hit during the middle of the night and the ammo dump went up with a roar which shook us and threw tracers around like the 4th of July. We were told this morning that they killed over 100 bad guys, but held the base. Tonight, we are told, it’s our turn.
Frankly, most of us would rather be back in the bush. Here, we feel trapped and unable to do anything but wait to die. But, we do what we can and what we must.
This old man was on KP duty at the firebase mess hall (Don’t ask how I got there. It’s a long story) when the rocket which killed Jim Stout came in. Jim never knew what hit him. I didn’t see him fall and didn’t even know he had been hit until LT. Hall came slithering into the bunker in which I had found refuge after being blown through the air and bounced off a building by another rocket. The guys in that little bunker weren’t even from my platoon, but I didn’t care. I was still at risk, but safer than “out there.”
LT Hall tumbled in and landed in a sitting position right beside me. He was literally soaked in blood, from his hair to his knees and smelled of copper. Another man grabbed him. “Are you hit?” he demanded.
“No. No.” he said. “It’s Stout. Half his head is gone.”
The details from here are unimportant, but a short time later I followed along as Stout was carried down to the chopper pad on the back of a jeep. He lay on a stretcher, encased in bandages all over his body, while a stranger held an IV bottle above him. I watched as my friend was loaded on the Dust-off, then walked up to the jeep. The stranger was crying. “He’ll make it,” he mumbled to nobody in particular. “He’ll make it.”
I looked at the stretcher. Its heavy canvas was saturated with Jim Stout’s blood and it had seeped through, pooled on the body of the jeep and ran down the sides onto the ground. No, I thought. He won’t make it.
He didn’t.
The ceremony is nearly complete now, the last strains of “Taps” fading away across the tombstones. The crowd grows slightly restless, the moment of remembrance is past and life goes on. Stout smiles at me for remembering him, for not forgetting, for holding to his life all these years. So do “Pops” Rose and Alan Gray and “Memphis” (How I wish I could recall his name!). So to do the wounded: Dunning and Ferguson and Smitty and Swonger and Haines and Robby and Tiny and even those I’ve forgotten.
These men are my Memorial Day. Now, they are yours. If you don’t have a face to put on the ceremony, they won’t mind if you use theirs.
The silence is broken only by the shuffling of the old men’s feet as they hobble forward on creaking knees, their gnarled, arthritic hands tenuously grasping a funeral wreath which they place in the designated spot, then snap to attention as well as their bowed backs will allow. They slowly raise their hands to their eyebrows in a well-remembered salute to their fallen brothers. These old men, Veteran’s of long-ago wars, each wearing a funny looking little hat shaped like a pup-tent, are serious about this. The small crowd of on-lookers is quiet and somber in reverence as the tinny tones of “Taps” blares out from a borrowed boom-box. Outside the cemetery, traffic whizzes by on its way to the lake.
This scene will be repeated thousands of times this weekend, all over America, as we pause to honor our war dead. With ceremonies, speeches, music, parades, we’ll take account of what our liberty has cost. Some will attend events like this, most won’t. Some won’t even think about the meaning of Memorial Day, but most will.
But what, or more accurately, who are we honoring? To the on-lookers, it’s the millions who have perished in defense of our freedoms and their emotions are genuine. Awestruck by the numbers, some will shed actual tears of grief and thankfulness for those unknown and un-named heroes, many of whom still lie in foreign soil. Their gratitude is real and their presence here is ample proof that they have not forgotten. Yet, it is strikingly impersonal to them, though they cannot be faulted for that. Most are not Veteran’s themselves, fewer still have actually heard the sound of death as it snaps by their ears during a firefight, or felt the whole-body thud of a deadly explosion at close range. They have never crouched over a dying comrade, trying desperately to find the source of all that blood, never had to inventory the personal effects of that man who never came back from patrol, never wrestled over the wording of the awful letter to his family. They’ve seen it in movies, they understand the implications, but they have no direct, personal frame of reference on which to hang today’s ceremonies.
That’s not so for those old men. To them, it’s far too personal. They’ve seen the elephant, felt the horror, washed another mans brains from their own face. To them, it’s not about honoring war dead in the abstract, but about real, live individuals; people they knew personally, men and women they lived with, fought with, cried with. The faces are there before their eyes as they go through the motions of laying the wreath and saluting. The dead pass before them, as if on parade, and while the crowd sees the ceremony, the old men see the death and feel the pain of loss.
How can that difference in perceptions between those old Veteran’s and the crowd of well-wishers be bridged? How can the old men make those who don’t know the awfulness of war understand? What could they say to make it all come clear in an instant, to reveal the true value and the true horror of what they’re all commemorating? Perhaps it can’t be done. Maybe it’s beyond the ability of any language to communicate.
Or, maybe it can be done by an introduction:
Crowd of honest, well-meaning people, let me introduce you to one of my faces. It’s a fairly pleasant face, not particularly handsome, but not ugly either. It’s a thin face, darkened by the sun and filth which turned each man in that place a deep, chestnut brown, more dirt than flesh. It’s a face with merry, laughing eyes which are somehow far, far too old for the face, as if they’d been lifted from some old grandpa and planted below the brow of this nineteen year old dead man. We see him just before he died and after more than nine months in the war, so he’s both young and terribly old at the same time. War does that to young men, you know. That’s why his eyes appear so old. But, he’s alive when we see him now, as he was alive then, but we know that face is now more than 41 years in the grave. He’s been dead now longer than he lived, but that doesn’t matter to us right now.
We see him smiling, and note the single false front tooth which he would pull out and stick in a shirt pocket whenever he thought it appropriate. We hear his voice as he chats merrily about the whore he met on R&R in Bangkok and plans to marry when he gets out of the Army. We see his innocent blindness to the laughter of his friends about that, his complete dedication and love for that nameless rent-a-girl with whom he found the comfort he so desperately needed to forget the madness of Vietnam, if even for a week or two. We can sympathize with his longing to recapture that feeling once again, but can’t imagine why he would take it that far!
But, he’s a good man, a good soldier, a teenager thrust into things far beyond his ability to control, but he’s adapted well enough to survive and that’s enough. And, he cares for the men of his platoon, his company, with a fervor only matched by those other men and rarely found anywhere outside of combat. He can be as brutal, as hard-hearted, as uncaring, unemotional and mean to the enemy as anyone else, but he’s reserved enough of his pre-war goodness of heart to go out of his way to help a new guy get squared away, to help him sort through the endless piles of Army junk and pick out only that which he will actually NEED to carry on his back. That new guy was me and I will be forever in his debt. Had he not taken the time, I might have been lost for want of that extra bandolier of ammunition or those other canteens which I didn’t know I could get.
We recall his attitude as much as we do his face. He was among that generation of soldiers who didn’t take to authority very easily. Rebellious, outspoken, sensitive to injustice, he was a product of his times, yet he was a good man, dependable in a fight and always up for a joke. A strutting, parade-ground marionette? Not hardly. A man on whom you could trust your life? Yes, absolutely. To me, that makes him a soldier, a man, to be admired.
See him now, when the First Sergeant thought his hair was too long while in from the bush on stand down? See how he, and another guy known as “Tiny,” grumbled their way to the barber and returned, only to be told it was still too long? See his anger? See his determination to make a statement? Notice how he’s smiling and winking when he comes back the second time with the prettiest Mohawk haircut you ever saw, precisely 2 inches long as the regulations require. Can you hear the First Sergeant explode? Yes, it’s hard to hear since they’re down in one of those underground bunkers where we lived like rats while on the firebase, but the message is clear. He made his statement, though it cost him an Article 15 for Defacing Government Property. He didn’t care.
Oh, but now, we see him a little later and now we come to the moment which this ceremony we’re all involved in is supposed to honor. We come to the moment of death for Specialist Fourth Class James R. Stout.
It happens on a little firebase called LZ Rawhide, west of Danang in the broad valley of the Song Vu Ghia river. We’ve been here a couple of days already, our mission to strengthen the base defenses in anticipation of May Day forgotten under a hail of 122mm Katyusha rockets and mortars. We don’t care about the mission as much as we care about staying alive, care about putting more mines and trip flares in the wire because we KNOW we’ll be hit tonight. Intelligence says to expect it and we know the enemy has moved in and occupied the little villages which ring this tiny hill, only 65 ft above sea level and not more than a few hundred yards long. We know this because we sat in our bunkers last night and heard them killing people, saw them burning houses and were powerless to stop it. We watched in awe as the South Vietnamese base down the road was hit during the middle of the night and the ammo dump went up with a roar which shook us and threw tracers around like the 4th of July. We were told this morning that they killed over 100 bad guys, but held the base. Tonight, we are told, it’s our turn.
Frankly, most of us would rather be back in the bush. Here, we feel trapped and unable to do anything but wait to die. But, we do what we can and what we must.
This old man was on KP duty at the firebase mess hall (Don’t ask how I got there. It’s a long story) when the rocket which killed Jim Stout came in. Jim never knew what hit him. I didn’t see him fall and didn’t even know he had been hit until LT. Hall came slithering into the bunker in which I had found refuge after being blown through the air and bounced off a building by another rocket. The guys in that little bunker weren’t even from my platoon, but I didn’t care. I was still at risk, but safer than “out there.”
LT Hall tumbled in and landed in a sitting position right beside me. He was literally soaked in blood, from his hair to his knees and smelled of copper. Another man grabbed him. “Are you hit?” he demanded.
“No. No.” he said. “It’s Stout. Half his head is gone.”
The details from here are unimportant, but a short time later I followed along as Stout was carried down to the chopper pad on the back of a jeep. He lay on a stretcher, encased in bandages all over his body, while a stranger held an IV bottle above him. I watched as my friend was loaded on the Dust-off, then walked up to the jeep. The stranger was crying. “He’ll make it,” he mumbled to nobody in particular. “He’ll make it.”
I looked at the stretcher. Its heavy canvas was saturated with Jim Stout’s blood and it had seeped through, pooled on the body of the jeep and ran down the sides onto the ground. No, I thought. He won’t make it.
He didn’t.
The ceremony is nearly complete now, the last strains of “Taps” fading away across the tombstones. The crowd grows slightly restless, the moment of remembrance is past and life goes on. Stout smiles at me for remembering him, for not forgetting, for holding to his life all these years. So do “Pops” Rose and Alan Gray and “Memphis” (How I wish I could recall his name!). So to do the wounded: Dunning and Ferguson and Smitty and Swonger and Haines and Robby and Tiny and even those I’ve forgotten.
These men are my Memorial Day. Now, they are yours. If you don’t have a face to put on the ceremony, they won’t mind if you use theirs.
Last edited:
