Posted on 05/23/2003 9:33:24 PM PDT by bellevuesbest
The Virginian-Pilot © May 23, 2003 It's the holiday that heralds the beginning of summer, a time for cookouts, family get-togethers and a first warm weekend at the beach. For most Americans, Memorial Day has lost any meaning apart from a long weekend. Brave men who fell at Valley Forge or Bull Run, on San Juan Hill or Iwo Jima, at Belleau Wood or the Chosin Reservoir tend to be far from Americans' minds during our day's respite from work.
But this year will be different. The return this weekend of America's military sons and daughters, flung across the globe to combat terrorism or oppression is an opportunity for Americans to restore to Memorial Day its original spirit of selflessness and remembrance.
Here in Hampton Roads, 16,000 sailors from the Truman battle group will return home today. The Roosevelt battle group will follow in its wake next Thursday, along with a smattering of other ships and planes this week and next. Thousands of military family members will gather on the piers and the tarmac, and rejoice that their loved ones have emerged from the latest conflict unscathed.
But others will return home no more. Their destiny is to span time and place, lying for eternity in the green havens of American military cemeteries around the world, their presence forever marking the battles, horrors and heroism that constitute our collective history and our nation's past. Some are buried at sea. Many are known only to God.
Death did not merely extinguish their lives. It robbed them of loves, dreams and reunions with their families. Like ripples in a pond, each such sacrifice forever altered the lives of parents, siblings, spouses and children.
A line in the military order that established Memorial Day in 1868 reads, ``let no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.'' To that end, Americans will pause in gratitude for one minute at 3 p.m. on Monday for the National Moment of Remembrance. Many of us will turn on our headlights or place our hands over our hearts. Some radio stations will play ``Taps.'' Silent prayers will be said, perhaps invoking the names of loved ones long gone.
As Hampton Roads residents prepare for the joy of reunion and homecoming, we should be conscious of our duty to remember the soldiers, sailors and airmen who never got a welcome-home kiss, a job-well-done handshake or a coveted medal. Americans have an obligation to honor sacrifices made on our collective behalf, and to return Memorial Day to its original purpose, if only for a single minute.
redrock
To the extent that that is true, we can only hope for less Memorial Day fervor rather than more . . .
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