Memorial Day is about sacrifice, not service
The Front Page
Morning Update
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
By Ken Tingley
Some years ago when I was editor of the newspaper, I remember getting a phone call chastising the newspaper for not recognizing all veterans on Memorial Day.
Championed by our then City Editor Bob Condon, the newspaper had run a two-page spread with the names of all those who had died fighting for our country from local communities all across the region. Condon had continually updated the names each year for publication on Memorial Day. I believe it is still the only comprehensive list for our region.
I gently explained to the reader that Memorial Day is not about honoring veterans’ service but about honoring those who paid the ultimate price. It was a somber occasion.
The reader told me I was wrong.
After World War II, when my father was a young man, I suspect that Memorial Day was a much more somber occasion. More than 600,000 Americans died in the war and it is likely it touched almost every family in the country. It was a time for remembering them.
Sadly, it has too often become nothing more than a three-day weekend where don’t even understand its true meaning.
When my son was growing up, I made it a point to take him to the Memorial Day parade each year. I’m sure many of you did the same. But how many of us have gone to the somber ceremony afterward honoring the dead.
How many of us have listened to our civic leaders remind us of the sacrifice of previous generations?
Probably, not many.
Recently, I noticed a prominent display on a lawn near my home in Queensbury.
It was a black cutout of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima near the end of World War II complete with a real American flag flapping in the breeze. The image is one of the most iconic images from World War II. The original photo by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal won the Pulitzer Prize and led to a monument in Washington, D.C. that was dedicated by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954.
At first, the display bothered me. I wondered if the owners new of the backstory to Iwo Jima where over 24,000 U.S, Marines were killed or wounded. Of the six men captured in the flag-raising photo, three were killed on Iwo Jima. I wondered if that should be glorified.
One of the flag-raisers was a Navy corpsmen whose son later went on to write a book about his father and Iwo Jima called “Flags of our Fathers.” The son never knew his father was one of the flag-raisers until after he died. His father never said a word. It’s like that for a lot of war veterans.
But each day as I passed the cutout of the flag-raising, I thought more and more about the image and the sacrifice those men made. More importantly, I got to thinking about Memorial Day. That display got me thinking about what Memorial Day is really all about.
More than 600,000 died in the American Civil War, over 400,000 in World War II, another 116,000 in World War I, 58,000 in Vietnam and 36,000 in Korea.
I’ve been doing some research lately about my mother’s Irish father. He served in the British Army during World War I, fought in the Battle of Somme and was wounded three times. But he never talked about the war.
“You don’t need to know about that,” he would tell my grandmother.
Today is about that type of sacrifice.
Earlier this year, I did a story about a Lake George kid named Bryce Crandall. He did two deployments in Afghanistan and his unit was under almost daily assault during his first year of service. When he returned, he had to deal with post traumatic stress.
But the day I talked to him, he told me he had recently learned of the death of another member of his unit. He told me his unit had now lost as many men since coming home as they did fighting in Afghanistan. That’s the military suicide problem.
That’s what we should be remembering most of all today.
That’s what we should be thinking about.
Because that is the true cost of war.
"If you are a Republican donor tweeting about how bad you feel about this, but you're donating to people like Elise Stefanik, you are part of the problem," said Ana Navarro.
It’s no wonder Republicans want to control what history is taught in schools. Otherwise, people like Stefanik and McCarthy and many others are going to come off poorly in the future.
I agree but some of the soldiers have been wounded very badly, PTSD, etc., somehow I think we should appreciate them too.