"THINKING ABOUT MEMORIAL DAY"

“THINKING ABOUT MEMORIAL DAY”

            My father served in the Army in World War II, but I don’t know any other details because he left my family and never returned.  My mother gave me what knowledge I have.  She and my father were married on Christmas Day, 1945, and I came along late the next November – yes, I counted the months too!  I was part of the huge baby boomer wave produced by the veterans returning from World War II.  Only later in her life did my mother tell me that she had lost her almost fiancé, Bob Buford, who was killed in World War II.  After her death, I found several letters to her from him, and then I found a letter from his father to my mother, telling her that Bob was missing in action over France in 1944.  So, on this Memorial Day, I’m remembering all that pain from soldiers lost in all our wars, and I’m giving thanks for their service for our country.

            The veterans of World War II never talked about it much.   I remember three comments, two from Arkansas memories.  My mother’s friend Bob Wetzel had served in the Pacific quadrant, and he hated Japanese people.  He was incensed when President Reagan signed the law providing reparations to descendants of American citizens who had been jailed during the war, with their only offense being their Japanese heritage.   In that same vein, I remember Alan Keesee talking about fighting in World War II, and he indicated that basic training had taught them that their enemies were not human beings like he was.  He said that if he thought that he was shooting at a person, who was human like himself, that he could not have pulled the trigger. 

            Finally, my friend, and now adopted father, Gay Wilmore talked about his service in Italy in World War II.  Being African-American, he, of course, had a vastly different view of the war, but he was there in Italy fighting for his country.  He remembered the Italian farmers who used to constantly rebuild the terraces for their vineyards, even in the midst of bombing and killing and war.  When he asked them why they did it, they indicated that life must go on, that they could not be totally defined by the war.  He used that image often as a metaphor in his struggles with the power of racism in this country, a struggle that continues to this day.

            I want to also give thanks for those who have served our country on these shores in the struggles for justice and equity.  Some were martyred directly, like my friend Ethel Steverson’s cousin Vernon Dahmer, who as killed in his home by the KKK in 1966 in Hattiesburg.  Some were beaten down by the power of race and oppression like Fannie Lou Hamer.   These are African-Americans, and here’s an important trivia question for you:  does anyone know of any white Southerners who were martyred during the modern civil rights movement?   There were white folks martyred in the South during that time, but they were not Southerners.  Alabaman Bob Zellner came close in McComb, but fortunately for us all, he survived.  My friends Ed Loring and David Billings have not been able to think of any, but surely there must be some – let me know if you have leads or knowledge.

            I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and I did my alternative service in Nashville running a halfway house for men getting out of prison.  I was in seminary and gave up my deferred status in 1970 in order to try to start a movement with others to end deferments for ministers and seminary students.  I never felt that the Vietnam War was anything but a misguided attempt to kill and maim people of a different color.  In saying this, I do not intend to demean the Americans who served there – I had two friends killed in that war.  It did make me understand that there is a war machine that loves to create chaos and death and profit.  That machine is obviously not confined to our country – Putin and Kim and Trump all seem cut from the same cloth, all war mongers who never served in the military, reminiscent of the leaders who sent us into the disastrous war in Iraq in 2003.

            So, on this Memorial Day, I give thanks for those who have served our country, overseas and on our soil.  Like many of us, I tremble for our country under the presidency of Donald Trump.  I cannot imagine that he will not take us into a war, especially as his legal and obstructionist troubles mount.  It will not be a war under that banner, of course.  It will be a war for democracy, as they all are, but to paraphrase Mark Twain – do we need another bandits’ war under the flag of our country?