Memorial Day should serve as recommitment

Monday is Memorial Day, a day marked in many ways.

There will be barbecues, picnics and other activities. If the weather is nice, some will head to the lake to get a start on summer, go for long hikes or work in their yard. There will be memorial services at cemeteries to honor those who gave their lives in service of their country.

Having attended these ceremonies, I find them moving and meaningful. But I’m not going to get preachy to encourage others to go because honestly, if it wasn’t for the fact of where I work, I probably wouldn’t attend them.

Instead, my Memorial Day observance would be what I do today, fly my flag and visit my dad in Riverside Memorial Cemetery.

It’s not that I don’t find these ceremonies valuable. On the contrary, they serve to remind us of the freedoms we enjoy, the sacrifices some have made to preserve those freedoms and our own responsibility to do likewise as citizens of this country and as human beings.

Defending freedom and service to country may be the reason men and women enlisted in the armed forces, but it and sacrifice are seldom what they think of when engaged in combat. From testimonies of veterans I’ve heard, including my father, their thoughts are more immediate: survival and not letting their buddies down.

Noble concepts of dying for one’s country aren’t involved as much as we might think. The object of war, as the late-actor George C. Scott said as the title character in the 1970 movie “Patton,” isn’t to die for one’s country, but “to make the other poor S.O.B. die for his country.”

The reality is, when our men and women enlist to serve, they do die for us. They also make other sacrifices, physical, mental and emotional.

In his 2016 book, “All the Gallant Men,” Pearl Harbor survivor Donald Stratton talks about these. In fact, not only is Stratton a Pearl Harbor survivor, he’s one of the few remaining survivors of that tragic day’s greatest catastrophes — the destruction of the battleship Arizona and the literal obliteration of over 1,000 young lives.

Stratton speaks of what he went through, his physical recovery, such as it was because to this day, his injuries impact him. But he also speaks of the mental and emotional traumas surrounding his and others experiences. For years, he wouldn’t speak of that day, and that pattern is often repeated by other veterans of other wars.

That’s the reality of service. That’s why it’s important for those of us who don’t choose a military career to be more diligent and thoughtful about our freedoms and the futures we envision.

We honor the service of the fallen on Monday, but really, it should also be a admittance of failure. Failure on our part to elect leaders who truly reflect how we view ourselves: as a compassionate, charitable and loving people.

Failure to insist our leaders follow our vision with policy toward peoples of other nations. Do we truly wish them to enjoy the same rights, such as the right to self-determination?

At some ceremonies this Monday, the 1915 classic poem “In Flanders Field” will be read. In it, the writer John McCrae tells us the dead look to us to take up the torch in the struggle with our foe, but “If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep, though poppies grow, In Flanders fields.”

While the soldiers of World War I struggled against each other, they really struggled for one common goal: peace. And after all, what good are freedoms without peace?

To honor those who have fallen, let all of us this Monday truly recommit to this most lofty of ideals.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.