Across the United States it is Memorial Day. While the origins of the holiday continue to be disputed, with many towns across the country claiming to have been the “first” to have held such observances, all start roughly at the end of the Civil War. “Decoration Day,” as it was originally known, commemorated the massive loss of life that resulted from that epic struggle for the soul of the Nation.With varying degrees of historical accuracy surrounding the exact origins of the ceremonies, it is difficult to say precisely which town “started” Memorial Day. Was it, as many believe (and Congress has even proclaimed), Waterloo, New York, where a prominent local business owner, My. Henry C. Welles, a druggist, mentioned to some friends in the summer of 1865 that there needed to be such a remembrance with flowers for the graves of fallen Union soldiers? Nothing came of it until Welles pushed the idea again the following spring and a local war hero, General John Murray rallied the support of local veterans. Or did Decoration Day start with Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, where women have been decorating the graves of Civil War veterans with flowers since October of 1864? Many other towns have similar claims, from Columbus, Mississippi – where both Union and Confederate dead were brought in by the trainloads – to Columbus, Georgia, whose residents completely support the claims of their namesake town in Mississippi… except that the Georgians claim the good folks from Mississippi were inspired by their earlier ceremony honoring war dead. Regardless, most agree that the formal proclamation in 1868 by Major General John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, calling for the annual decoration of war graves on the last Monday in May, is the beginning of the “modern” Memorial Day.
If you hang around the ‘Net long enough, even on a sacred day like today, you can find assholes talking about how any military member who died in Iraq/Afghanistan/or whatever other conflict with which they happen to disagree as “war criminals” or noting that soldiers “got what they deserved.” I wish I were making that up. I won’t even link to the comments, lest they I give them more dignity than they deserve.
Anyway, for me, the most compelling story about memorial day’s origins, and the most timely given the current racial divisions that are tearing at the fabric of our country, is owned by Charleston, South Carolina, where local papers support the claim that on May 1, 1865, newly “freedmen” – former slaves – properly reburied 257 Union soldiers found at a former racetrack turned war prison. These African Americans – and that term would be truly apt for many of the 28 men said to have participated – held a ceremony to commemorate the reburial and called the almost-assuredly white Union soldiers “Martyrs of the Race Course.” Professor David W. Blight, in his book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”described it thusly:
The “First Decoration Day,” as this event came to be recognized in some circles in the North, involved an estimated ten thousand people, most of them black former slaves. During April, twenty-eight black men from one of the local churches built a suitable enclosure for the burial ground at the Race Course. In some ten days, they constructed a fence ten feet high, enclosing the burial ground, and landscaped the graves into neat rows. The wooden fence was whitewashed and an archway was built over the gate to the enclosure. On the arch, painted in black letters, the workmen inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
At nine o’clock in the morning on May 1, the procession to this special cemetery began as three thousand black schoolchildren (newly enrolled in freedmen’s schools) marched around the Race Course, each with an armload of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by three hundred black women representing the Patriotic Association, a group organized to distribute clothing and other goods among the freedpeople. The women carried baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses to the burial ground. The Mutual Aid Society, a benevolent association of black men, next marched in cadence around the track and into the cemetery, followed by large crowds of white and black citizens.
All dropped their spring blossoms on the graves in a scene recorded by a newspaper correspondent: “when all had left, the holy mounds — the tops, the sides, and the spaces between them — were one mass of flowers, not a speck of earth could be seen; and as the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them, outside and beyond … there were few eyes among those who knew the meaning of the ceremony that were not dim with tears of joy.” While the adults marched around the graves, the children were gathered in a nearby grove, where they sang “America,” “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
At a time when our nation is rife with so-called “black leaders” using every opportunity they can to stoke the fires of racial divide in order to generate funds for their organizations*, try to imagine the scene above occurring today. (If you struggle to see it the way I do, that may be an indicator of just how bad things have gotten.) I served with a variety of races, creeds, colors, from folks of black skin and hispanic heritage to Thai – and even Afghan citizens who had come to United States decades ago and then gone back to their native land to fight with U.S. Forces. What struck me about all of them was not the differences that either their heritage or skin color or even accents gave them, but rather how very “American” they were – how similar we were in our shared cultural values. They were my brothers and sisters and volunteered to serve, in peace and in war.
On this Memorial Day, like a lot of the more recent Memorial Days, my community – the CrossFit Community – widely and justifiably honors Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, with many boxes holding “Memorial Day Murph” events, paying tribute with sweat rather than flowers, to a man who was one of ours. It’s odd for me because I was in country at the same time as Lieutenant Murphy, not very far away when his Team was “walked on” on June 28, 2005. I was not yet a CrossFitter – that would come just 4 months later while I was in Jalalabad, Afghanistan – but I was a Marine and when we heard the calls for react forces and the intel came trickling in, we geared up as quickly as we could, just in case we were needed. In fact, it looked like we were the closest significant forces on the ground, but by the time we could be mobilized we heard that the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) from Bagram were already inbound to help Murph and his Team. Imagine our reactions as we checked in with the radio operator to find out that the QRF had been shot down by an enemy RPG, resulting in another 16 U.S. deaths – 8 Navy SEALs and 8 Army SOF soldiers.
Operation Red Wings – the attempt to capture Ahmad Shah, a genuinely bad guy and enemy to Afghans and the U.S. led coalition in Afghanistan – eventually ceded to Operation Whalers in August 2005, where Shah was seriously wounded and his forces around Asadabad near decimated. Shah was later killed in a firefight with police in Pakistan in 2008. The wikipedia article on Red Wings is worth reading.
The thing that I think always gets forgotten on Memorial Day is all of those who died in service to our country during less notable conflicts or moments. My military service was spent mostly in peacetime. I was commissioned right after the Gulf War, just before Memorial Day (May 11th) of 1991. For most of the 90’s, I lost lots of friends, but not in conflict. Clark “Swab” Cox, a dear friend and fellow Cobra pilot, died along with Jerrell “Cletus” Boggan, both men with whom I flew and served at HML/A-269. Linked here is a typical sample of all that I can find online to commemorate those losses – and even that piece got the squadron wrong (HML/A-267 is a west coast skid squadron; we were with 269, on the east coast). I lived in base housing on the same street with Clark. We did our first float together the summer prior, in 1995. We did our first “TOW” shoots together as new pilots. He was there in the summer of 1994 when I survived a dual-engine failure and crash at 29 Palms. “Cletus” was a (relatively) “younger” guy and new to the squadron, but I voted (along with almost everyone else in the squadron at our “Cobra Court” at which call signs were given) to nickname him “Cletus” because of the giant truck he drove and his thick southern accident. Oddly enough, we all got it wrong – we were thinking of “Cooter,” the truck-driving mechanic from the “Dukes of Hazard” but we were drunk and the name stuck.
Johnny “Nuts” Ruocco was the funniest guy at HML/A-269 and if my memory serves correct, he was one of the participants in that same Cobra Court in the mid-90’s. He had just returned from deployment and integrated himself seamlessly back into the squadron with all of the new faces, mine included. John was a Boston kid and had a wicked sense of humor. He was always the one with a joke and kind word. He hanged himself in a hotel room in 2005, a casualty of war that only now the military is beginning to acknowledge. In this report, it notes in passing that he “had struggled with depression in the past, particularly after a training accident in the 1990s when two Cobras collided in midair, and he lost four friends.” I know that crash. It happened while I was in the training squadron and already knew I was going to 269. Two Cobras with four very experienced pilots collided during a night-vision goggle mission at Twenty-Nine Palms, the same place I would crash 8 months after joining the squadron. Mark “Rule Daddy” Rullman was a beloved member of that squadron (from what I gathered) and when I showed up and later became the legal officer, I had to help finish up a lot of the administrative paperwork that surrounded Mark’s death.
The parade of death in peacetime didn’t stop there. I was getting ready to leave flying to become a lawyer in 1996 when Bob “Squire” Edwards, a Cobra pilot with our sister squadron HML/A-167, died bringing a bird back from the Bell plant in Texas. The details can be found in this federal court decision in which it was determined that his wife Sally, and their two children, were entitled to nothing, despite the fact that the helicopter he was flying came apart over Georgia, killing him and his co-pilot. Bob lived across the street from me. While we weren’t particularly close, I remember distinctly coming home from work after learning about his death and seeing his young son, perhaps two or three, sitting out on the front steps of the house waiting for his dad to come home. It went on for a week or so, I believe. Dad wasn’t coming home – ever. I knew of his death because the tail rotor had come apart and as the Quality Assurance Officer for 269, my two senior Staff NCO’s were part of the original engineering investigation. Pieces of the tail rotor were sitting in my office. I could look up from my desk and see them.
Ron “Wiggy” Walkerwicz died the day his wedding invitations were received by his closest friends. After we had just completed a very successful deployment in the Mediterranean Sea, during which we had rescued an Air Force pilot shot down over Bosnia, Wiggy, one of the 5 or 6 Harrier pilots on our deployment, who had orders to go to Air Force test pilot school, was flying as the third aircraft in a three ship flight, when he went into the clouds and his AV-8B harrier was struck by lightning. He lost all electrical power and, thus, his instruments immediately after going into the clouds on a gloomy North Carolina day. I know because less than a hundred miles to the south, on Friday, February 16, 1996, I was flying a helicopter in those same low ceilings and light rain. By the time I got done flying and finished the paperwork on my test hop, I knew he was dead.
The list of the dead in peacetime is indeed long, though certainly nowhere near the toll that war takes on young men and women. These are just some of the men I knew, with whom I served, who volunteered and put their lives at risk for this experiment known as the “United States of America.” I’m not overtly patriotic, at least not in the “flag-waving, my country no matter what” kind of way that dominates Fox news, but I think it’s important to remember on “Decoration Day” that the men and women who served, from the Civil War to the Argonne, from Belleau Wood to Choisin Reservoir, to the killing fields in Vietnam, to the deserts in Iraq and the mountains of the Korengal Valley, and yes, even off the coast of North Carolina during peacetime, believed with all of their hearts in a Constitutional Republic, where men and women of all races and creeds were free to live their lives as pleased in peace, specifically because guys like Johnny Ruocco and Clark Cox and Jerrell Boggan and Ron Walkerwicz and Squire Edwards and many, many more were willing to take their turn on the wall and make sure that the Nation was safe from external threats. That job necessarily meant that we left the issues of which wars were to be fought, and where and when and against whom, to the political processes, as the Constitution commands. That also means that we entrusted the care to ensure that our political leadership was accountable to the citizens whom we protected – including the same assholes who feel justified in calling American dead “war criminals” and “murderers.” I don’t engage that kind of idiocy, but it strikes me as rather ironic that these people feel that the political responsibility for where and when we fight is somehow our fault, rather than theirs or our political leaders.
You can even find “respectable” writers, like Sheldon Richman, flaunting their cowardice during Vietnam as some kind of proof of their patriotism because they believe the far left trope about that war being “illegal” or “immoral.” I always want to ask the very simple question: if I accept we were wrong to be in Vietnam specifically because of the deaths that resulted, whether it’s the 58,000 American lives or the estimated 791,000-1.14 million Vietnamese (on both sides) who died during the war, then what does that mean for the NVA and the Communist forces that took over after we left? Because the estimates for what happened after 1975 look like this:
Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA Spring Offensive were killed or abducted on the road to Tuy Hòa in 1975. Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 1–2.5 million sent, while somewhere between 50,000 and 250,000 were executed. Rummel estimates that slave labor in the “New Economic Zones” caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported). According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea, although Rummel cites estimates ranging from 100,000 to 1,000,000. Including Vietnam’s foreign democide, Rummel estimates that a minimum of 400,000 and a maximum of slightly less than 2.5 million people died of political violence from 1975–87 at the hands of Hanoi. In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.
Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge killed 1–3 million Cambodians in the killing fields, out of a population of around 8 million. The Pathet Lao killed some 100,000 Hmong people in Laos.
So, Sheldon Richman and his ilk either have to say that Vietnamese lives don’t matter and no American life was worth being spent there – and that’s a kind of realpolitik you will never hear anyone on the left admit to – or the conclusion is that if all human life is sacred, then our attempt to the prohibit what came later was justified, even if we didn’t succeed. And we didn’t succeed largely because the same douchebags who were saying it was immoral helped contribute directly to what followed. Fucktards – and cowards at that.
For my part, I will spend Memorial Day with the images in my mind of those young men and women with whom I served when they still walked among us, when they laughed and joked, lived and loved. I will also hold in my mind a vision of the Republic that they served – one that appreciated their sacrifice – like those newly freed slaves, who thought it worthy of memorializing the sacrifice of Union soldiers one-hundred fifty years ago.
*Lest there be any doubt about whom I’m talking, I invite anyone to look at (for just one example) the “Reverend” Jesse Jackson’s comments after Reginald Denny was beaten near to death by 3 black man on camera in the 1992 LA Riots. Or the “Reverend” Al Sharpton’s comments on.. well, just about anything. But his role in the 1991 Crown Heights Riots in which an innocent Jewish man Yankel Rosenbaum was beaten to death by a mob incited by Sharpton – after the death of a young black boy named Gaven Cato – is a good place to start.