Fairfax, VA, USA. We have been at war for as long as I have been alive. I have high school classmates, some of whom I knew in elementary school, who did not make it back from Viet Nam.

I have relatives who fought and died or were injured in World War II. My father fought in China, my uncles in Europe, my cousin in the Pacific for the Navy. The Fifth Column killed a relative after the war had officially ended.


If I trace the line back far enough, my ancestors engaged the enemy in World War I and both the American Civil and Revolutionary Wars. My Iroquois fought and killed most anybody.



In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—  Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD
(1872-1918) Canadian Army
3 May 1915, At Flanders Fields

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John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields as he sat upon the back of a medical field ambulance near an advance dressing post at Essex Farm, just north of Ypres. It was just a day after he presided over the funeral and burial of his friend Lieutenant Alex Helmer, who had been killed during the Second Battle of Ypres.When I was three or four, the Army recalled my next door neighbor to participate in the Korean War. I have friends and co-workers who fought in Bosnia, fought in Desert Storm, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan and am acquainted with those who fought the Cold War and the one that continues now behind the headlines.

The war goes on.

Peace is an abnormality; war, humanity’s normal state. Africa, Eastern Europe, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines, I know someone who knows someone who was there. Up and down Central and South America we have fought.

I freely admit there is blood on our hands, but our enemies are neither innocent nor bloodless. We enter into this world with full knowledge that our hands are and will be stained. The world is not a gentle place.

Open a newspaper. Turn on your radio or television. Click on MSNBC, CNN, Google, or Fox. Behind the paparazzi and the Kardashians, the stand-up snark, the distortions of local politics, the world is in turmoil.

There are strangers among us who would have us dead. I expect we will be at war when I take my last breath.

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance for those who have given their lives in the service of the United States. [N1] First proclaimed in 1868 by General John Logan, Commander in Chief of the Army of the Republic, many cities and towns lay claim to being its birthplace. It is difficult to prove its exact origins.

Memorial Day seems to has been born spontaneously in the aftermath of the Civil War in memory of the 750,000 – 850,000 Americans who died in its battles. [N2] Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, no one forgot the blood and destruction.

Following Logan’s General Order No. 11, flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, 30 May 1868. A remembrance, now embracing all wars, that repeats itself in cemeteries across the United States and around the world.

Memorial Day should unite and not divide us. We honor, as one people, all those who died serving our nation. Their blood is our blood. Their family is our family. One Union surrounds us.

I remember too many of the buried. I suspect I will remember too many more before I leave this planet and join our mutual past. No one said life would be easy.

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