Every Memorial Day I think of my great uncle. He was from a small town in the midwest, a young man with much ahead of him. My grandmother, his younger sister, remembers her summers playing on the shores of Lake Superior imagining that Nazi or Japanese subs might suddenly appear and she’d have to have a plan to escape. My great uncle died in the Battle of the Bulge, in that bitter cold in a foreign land. We believe he was killed now by ‘friendly’ fire and his first letters home had never made it before the notification of his death arrived.
I can’t imagine my families grief, no doubt it was somewhat restrained. They were Baptists. That death seems symbolic as our familial loss was mirrored across the country and then perhaps it was the beginning of a slower death. The war propelled America into a dominant position, perhaps it was always destined to take but many of its citizens were still wary of.
The transformation of the US and the world since that war can’t be overstated. Even as we move further away from it and thousands of families of the dead of more recent wars (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, GWOT) mourn their dead I think that Second World War still looms so large as both national and ideological myth. The last good fight. It’s an unusual shadow we all live in, the further away we get and as the last men who fought in it die it perhaps will slide a bit further into the recesses of memory.
Today is not a day to be righteous.
Today is a day to remember those who died.
They didn't die for what this country had become, they may not even had died for the cause at the time.
They died alongside men like them, men who believed in duty and honor.
Men who had seen fear and overcome it.
Braver men than me.
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