MEMORIAL DAY

   Exactly one year ago I was in Hawaii for the launch of our book “Pearl Harbor.” I know, tough job. A lot of it was great fun, especially because my teen age daughter Meghan, my close buddy Bill Butterworth IV  (WEB Griffin Jr.), and Newt’s wife, Callista were with me as well. Sure between breaks we did the usual fun things you do in Hawaii, but that is not what I feel so compelled to write about today, on this the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend.
 
   When I was a kid, old folks still use to call it Decoration Day, and young historian that I was even then, I knew the origin of that. A year or two after the end of the Civil War, a Union officer observed Southern women, “decorating” graves with spring time flowers...the graves of Union soldiers, graves of the enemy who had so recently defeated them. Profoundly moved he asked why, and their response was that they did not have the graves of their own sons, husbands and fathers to honor thus, for they had fallen on so many distant battlefields. Their prayer was that someone, far away, would do that honor for them, as they now honored the graves of former enemies, who in the “next world,” were undoubtedly at peace and in brotherhood with the soldiers of the South. The story conjures for me the ghostly imagine of women, dressed in black, standing by newly turned graves, placing their flowers, and something of their spirits linger there even now.  
 
   And thus from such simple acts of love and compassion the tradition grew. Eventually it would become a national holiday to honor the fallen of the Civil War. And as the years passed, and more wars filled yet more cemeteries, the honoring embraced the fallen of those conflicts as well.   
  
   I remember as a boy my home town, just outside of New York City, would have a parade, and the four cemeteries in the town were the stopping points. A prayer would be read, flowers laid, a volley fired, taps sounded, and then the parade would resume. I remember how aged veterans of the Spanish American War would ride in open cars, how veterans of the First World War, still hale and hearty, in their early to mid sixties would march, some in the even then quaint uniforms of the Dough Boys, and by the hundreds young men in their late twenties and early thirties, veterans of Pearl Harbor, Anzio, Iwo, the Chosen Reservoir would fill the ranks. I remember how proud I was the year I was selected to carry the flag for my cub scout pack which marched in the parade as well.
 
   It was a day, in my memory of solemn pride, of tears for fallen comrades and family, it was a day that touched deeply into my young heart.
 
   I am so saddened now as I write this. The mid day news program was filled with ads trumpeting the great sales this weekend. It’s now the “official start of summer,” and time to head to the lake, the beach, and wait, you can even get a new car this weekend at that special Memorial Day sale.
 
   Maybe it was the same when I was a kid. We all change and hallow some memories of childhood, but was it really all about that, the sales, heading to the beach, its time to party? I’d prefer to think not...at least it wasn’t for me back then, for my father, my grandfather, for the men I remember in those parades.
 
   Over fifty years of parades have passed since my memory of that day I carried a flag. The veterans of the Spanish-American War are all gone  (which war was that, did we really have a war with Spain, is now often asked.) Of the ranks of doughboys, all but one lone survivor, as I write this, is still alive in the entire United States. And of the men of World War II, we all see how the ranks have thinned and in a few more years will be vacant.
 
   When my daughter was less then three years old, I started a tradition with her. In my small town in western North Carolina, there is a state maintained veterans cemetery. Close to three thousand veterans rest there now, a number of them close friends who have passed on since I moved here, including “Bob” Morgan, pilot of the famed “Memphis Belle.” My daughter and I, every year, visit the cemetery. Before going there we would pick wild flowers, and clip some freshly blooming roses and then go to “decorate soldiers’ graves.”  When she was three, five, seven years old, she would wander about, and I would try to tell her a bit about what we were doing and why. She would sometimes run between the rows of headstones, then pause, announcing, “I’ll put a flower here,” and then run on. (And I think who rested there would have smiled, at the innocence of a small child doing thus for him.) As she matured the event became more solemn for her. We would walk amongst the rows of graves and I’d hear her say  “Dad, this man received the Purple Heart,” and she would put a flower on his grave...and we would stop as well at the graves of friends we had known, my neighbor’s father, and of course Bob Morgan.    
 
   So last year we were in Hawaii on Memorial Day. Together with our friend Bill Butterworth we went to the “Punch Bowl.” It is often referred to as the “Arlington of the Pacific.” There rest the remains of over 25,000 of our dead from World War II. It can be a tearful moment when you first drive in on Memorial Day...for you see 25,000 small flags fluttering in the tropical breeze. 25,000 young lives cut short in sacrifice in a war none of them started, but a war which they won, a war which liberated hundreds of millions from tyranny, a war which insured I would grow up in relative safety, as has my daughter. Engraved on monuments of marble are the names of over 50,000 more, the names of men whose bodies were never recovered, or buried at sea.    
 
   We had no flowers with us that morning, but the good people of Hawaii have a tradition...each grave was decorated with a small lai, the traditional Hawaiian necklace of flowers. My friend Bill and I felt compelled, as writers, to make our own offering. We went to the grave of Ernie Pyle, truly the greatest correspondent of them all, who was killed in the last months of the war, and on his headstone we each placed a pen, our way as writers of saying “thank you sir.” What shattered all three of us though was when we walked several rows back behind Ernie’s grave and suddenly we came upon headstones, with the same last name...brothers resting side by side. There would be one for a twenty one year old, and then “USS Arizona, December 7, 1941.” And next to that grave would be another, with the same last name, age eighteen “USMC, February 23, 1945.” A grave for a brother who most likely stood in the doorway with his parents  at the age of fifteen, as the Western Union boy came up their walkway, bearing the dreaded telegram...”regret to inform you that...” A boy who then manfully went into the marines as soon as he was old enough, thinking of his big brother, killed at Pearl Harbor...and then his blood would soak into the black sand of Iwo Jima.   
 
   The three of us cried. I am not ashamed to admit that, nor is my friend Bill, or my daughter, we cried as we looked at those headstones. For me, the tears were not really for the young lives cut short...for after all, they rest in honored peace and were greeted by our Lord, embraced in Heaven by their brother of birth, and their brothers in arms who went before them. For me it was the ghostly image of others standing by the grave. What of the other brothers and sisters of those fallen, the girl friend or perhaps the young wife...and what of the parents. The British allow families to have a small statement carved into the headstone of their fallen. I remember one such headstone at Normandy for a seventeen year old, which simply said, “Sleep in peace our beloved child, and we will see you in the morning.”    
 
   So on this Memorial Day, I’ll ask but a couple of favors of you who read this. Yes, it is the first day of summer and perhaps the beach does call, but take a few minutes, just a few. There might no longer be parades in your town, but so what. Pick a few flowers from your yard, as did the Southern ladies of so long ago. If you have young children, taken them with you, and let them find the graves of “the soldiers,” in a nearby cemetery. And leave the flowers there in the old tradition of “Decoration Day.” But think for a moment as well, not just of the fallen, but of the ghostly memories around each of those graves, of young love that was never fulfilled (I think of a favorite teacher who never married, and one day in tears told me how her fiancée was killed in France), of a child who never knew her father...and perhaps most painful of all, the parents who lost a son, or sons...and gave such a sacrifice to our country in its hour of need.  Parents who most likely then stood by their graves, placed flowers upon them and whispered...”sleep in peace my beloved child, and I will see you in the morning.”
 
“That from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that Cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.”
 
 
Sincerely,
 
Bill Forstchen