Happy Memorial Day all! I think it’s appropriate that we take a moment from our cook outs and BBQs to remember those who served this country but didn’t make it home.

I lost a great uncle at Saipan and the wife lost one too in the Java Sea.

(05-31-2021 08:55 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Happy Memorial Day all! I think it’s appropriate that we take a moment from our cook outs and BBQs to remember those who served this country but didn’t make it home.

I lost a great uncle at Saipan and the wife lost one too in the Java Sea.

We are very blessed to live in this great nation. Let's all ponder today the magnitude of the sacrifice that so many brave women and men have made for freedoms and opportunities. And let's be humbled by that thought.

There are some things that remain etched in your memories which are simple yet indelible. In mine it a street covered by a canopy of oak trees that stretched for over a mile as you entered my parents hometown. A few homes were brick, but most were wooden and painted white and all had porches that faced the sidewalk and on memorial day and Christmas each had a window in which a banner (memorial day) or electric candles might be displayed. The banners were trimmed in red with a white field in which there was a star or stars. Some stars were blue and some were gold. The electric Christmas candles had either blue lights in them or golden ones or both and would also vary in number. Each star or candle represented a family member in wartime service. If the stars were blue they were still alive, if they were golden they had been killed in action.

On Memorial Days following the war and at Christmas the windows were always adorned. And over the years those with all blue stars disappeared and only those with one or more gold stars or gold candles remained, and then they too disappeared. The proud yet ever grieving wives and mothers had passed. And with their passing so too left the pride of having a family that had bonded with their countrymen in time of national, if not global, peril and gone with them also was the collective grief that touched every heart who beheld gold stars and golden candles.

Not all banners and candles were for WWII. Some represented Korea too. Viet Nam somehow changed it, though not in the small towns.

When I learned what those symbols meant it profoundly changed how I looked upon and interacted with those who shared what for a few years was my home town as well. In each home in the den or living room you could look upon the sepia colored portrait of a young face in uniform and see the ones they had lost and not forgotten, and even for a small town there were way too many.

Memorial day for me has always conjured the faces of those sweet women with fragile smiles who had, as Lincoln once penned, "laid so great an offering on the altar of freedom." They treated all young people like the children they had lost and were to all of us a second mom whose gaze may have been more protective than that of the women who gave us birth.

Yes, a big thank you to all who serve our country and especially who gave the ultimate sacrifice for us to have our freedoms.

Yes, THANK YOU SOLDIERS!

(05-31-2021 08:55 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Happy Memorial Day all! I think it’s appropriate that we take a moment from our cook outs and BBQs to remember those who served this country but didn’t make it home.

I lost a great uncle at Saipan and the wife lost one too in the Java Sea.

Question: We usually talk about memorial day as being for armed forces personnel who died in combat, like your relatives.

But what about those who die outside of combat? Like what if we're not at war, and an Army helicopter on a training flight in Iowa crashes and three soldiers on board die? Are they under the Memorial Day rubric too?

(05-31-2021 09:53 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(05-31-2021 08:55 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Happy Memorial Day all! I think it’s appropriate that we take a moment from our cook outs and BBQs to remember those who served this country but didn’t make it home.

I lost a great uncle at Saipan and the wife lost one too in the Java Sea.

Question: We usually talk about memorial day as being for armed forces personnel who died in combat, like your relatives.

But what about those who die outside of combat? Like what if we're not at war, and an Army helicopter on a training flight in Iowa crashes and three soldiers on board die? Are they under the Memorial Day rubric too?

Speaking precisely, no.
For my Memorial Day reflection today I walked through the USNA Cemetery and Memorial Hall. In the cemetery it was in the back of my mind that those lost in combat were the minority.
In Memorial Hall, I gazed at the ten classmates' names on our plaque memorializing those lost in operations - only one was a combat death, listed under the "Don't Give Up the Ship" flag with every grad lost in our nation's conflicts.
I thought of others taken too soon, but not in operational circumstances, including as just one example a classmate whose widow is a sister of my company-mate - my daughters might not remember now, but they played with his daughter who never knew him as small children.
It's hard to narrow the meaning of the day without diminishing the other memories, but it is also right and good to specify the meaning of the day.

As mentioned in a different thread, Jack Chevigny was one of two Texas football coaches to finish with a losing record. But he had the distinction of falling at Iwo Jima. He's a legend, being part of the "win one for the Gipper."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Chevigny

"John Edward Chevigny (August 14, 1906 – February 19, 1945) was an American football player, coach, lawyer, and United States Marine Corps officer who was killed in action on the first day of the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. He is best known for scoring the famous "that's one for Gipper" touchdown for Notre Dame on November 10, 1928 versus Army at Yankee Stadium. One of the Great Depression-era football stars, he was one of the best blocking backs for Knute Rockne's Notre Dame football team in the 1920s. Chevigny later served as the head coach of the NFL's Chicago Cardinals in 1932 and the head football coach at the University of Texas from 1934 to 1936...."

And another legend about him-as UT football coach he lead them to a famous upset of Notre Dame in South Bend:

"...Another legend surrounding Chevigny is that, after the 1934 football victory, he had been presented a fountain pen with the inscription, "To Jack Chevigny, a Notre Dame boy who beat Notre Dame", and that on September 2, 1945, this pen was discovered in the hands of one of the Japanese officer envoys at the surrender of Japan on the battleship USS Missouri. ..."

(05-31-2021 09:53 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(05-31-2021 08:55 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Happy Memorial Day all! I think it’s appropriate that we take a moment from our cook outs and BBQs to remember those who served this country but didn’t make it home.

I lost a great uncle at Saipan and the wife lost one too in the Java Sea.

Question: We usually talk about memorial day as being for armed forces personnel who died in combat, like your relatives.

But what about those who die outside of combat? Like what if we're not at war, and an Army helicopter on a training flight in Iowa crashes and three soldiers on board die? Are they under the Memorial Day rubric too?

100 percent they are.

(06-01-2021 04:11 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  

(05-31-2021 09:53 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(05-31-2021 08:55 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Happy Memorial Day all! I think it’s appropriate that we take a moment from our cook outs and BBQs to remember those who served this country but didn’t make it home.

I lost a great uncle at Saipan and the wife lost one too in the Java Sea.

Question: We usually talk about memorial day as being for armed forces personnel who died in combat, like your relatives.

But what about those who die outside of combat? Like what if we're not at war, and an Army helicopter on a training flight in Iowa crashes and three soldiers on board die? Are they under the Memorial Day rubric too?

100 percent they are.

I think they all should be honored, including the ones that returned alive, but were never the same. My father was in the military and as a teenager I got to meet some of the young kids coming back from Vietnam, kids that were just a few years older than I was. I did not like what I was seeing and one guy I became a brief friend with ended up in Germany in a hospital. Very nice guy, but dealing with a lot. I just wonder how some of these young kids turned out.