Memorial Day

On Memorial Day this year we enjoyed a delightful pot-luck supper organized by an old, generous, and endlessly hospitable friend, who had gathered a group mainly of elderly familiars of many years.  Of course one always “does” something on Memorial Day weekend, but it rarely is to focus consciously on our nation’s dead warriors.  More prominent in our thoughts is the opening of the pool.

Now that practically all the “greatest generation” is gone I think it might be time to include within our memorializations a fuller recognition of the many thousands of veterans who survived the war in a sense more technical than actual.  That is, I think a very large number of men, and then by inevitable process their spouses and children, should be recognized as long-term casualties of war.  I think this when I reflect on the three members of my own family—my father and his two brothers—who fought in the war.  None was killed or seriously wounded; but I have concluded in retrospect that all three were significantly impaired by the experience.  They did not give up their whole lives, but enough of them to show, enough to earn a kind of spiritual partial credit in our national memory.  Details here are not particularly important.  They varied with every one of the war’s participants; certainly they were different for the three brothers who have this week been so much in my mind.  But the imposition of protracted trauma on so many of our young men for so extended a period left the whole country wounded in a fashion I am only now, three-quarters of a century later, able to realize.

Of course in presuming to judge in such matters, I have to be aware that there are many kinds of wounds including, perhaps especially including, those inflicted by parents.  The only thing more difficult to assess honestly than one’s own parenting is that of someone else.  There is usually a naturally loving relationship between grandparent and grandchild.  Certainly the unique joys of being a grandparent are great enough to survive being the stuff of bumper stickers; and most kids love their grandparents.  Even were there no piety, there should always at least be prudence.   Hence I try to assess my own forebears with the forbearance I will require, and certainly must hope for, from my own posterity.  Of course I loved my grandfather Fleming, and have a few jovial memories of him.  But when from the vantage point of my own old age I really reflect upon the way he treated his children, and more especially the way he treated his wife, I have to conclude that he was a hard man, the product of a hard life.  Its precise details were not within the public domain of family discussion.  The high point of his life, after which all seems to have been some kind of decline, came early.  He had been a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

He regarded this conflict as “the real end of the Civil War”.  His argument was that it provided young (white) Southerners the chance to reintegrate with the United States, and join as fellow Americans with their old regional adversaries in the common cause of whipping “tyrants”—as their grandfathers had in the Revolution.  For years I believed that that was an adequate account of our national episode of belligerence with the sorry remnants of a cancerous Spanish empire in its third century of rapid decline.

He and his wife were a rather odd couple.  She was oppressively religious and dutiful.  If he ever darkened the door of a church, I was unaware of it.  They were the parents of seven children, four sisters and three brothers.   My own father, Marvin, born in 1906, was the middle son.  He was always very close to his elder brother John, for whom I was named, and who remained a lifetime inspiration to me.  The youngest son, Wayne, was significantly younger than his brothers, but all were of an age to be overwhelmed by the Depression along with their father and practically all of working America.

To this day the Depression plays a larger role in our national pathologies than we may recognize.  In this regard, the world war, horrible though it was, actually takes on an ambiguous cast.  The New Deal struggled to get us out of the Depression, but the war really did get us out.  What was true 0f the nation was even truer of the individual lives of its men.  The war offered purpose and authorized agency that the economic malaise of our national life could not.  But it also so distorted the lives of many of those who fought it, and so disturbed the moral rhythms of the country to which they returned victorious as to make them in large measure strangers in a strange land.  In its aggregate, a national trauma of this size was different in kind rather than in degree from the experience of Vietnam, large as that was, or from our continuing “low visibility” conflicts prosecuted by voluntary professionals in Iraq, Afghanistan, an who knows where next.  That distinction, however, can hardly comfort our contemporary casualties.

All three of the Fleming brothers were enlisted men.  John, who never rose above the rank of seaman, served on LSTs, including at Anzio, where his ship suffered many casualties.  But the only military thing he talked about, endlessly and somewhat boringly, was the awesome sight of the port of Plymouth on the eve of the Normandy invasion.  My father and Wayne were both petty officers.  My father fought all the way from the Battle of Midway to Okinawa, and he did not want to talk about any of it.  Wayne may have had it the worst.  He was a sergeant in a tank crew in some of the most desperate fighting in the northern advance from Normandy.  He had seen unspeakable things, which in rare moments he did nevertheless manage to communicate, sort of.  His closest friend had had his head blown off, I believe literally, while fighting next to, or at least near to my uncle.  He told me the worst thing about war was its smell, the stench of rotting, swollen cattle carcasses in every field and along every roadway in France.  I do not think he ever entirely escaped that stench for the rest of his life.  Who could?