The first Memorial Day parade I remember was in Dedham, MA, probably around 1938 or 1939, when I was 4 or 5. There were the doughboys with their flat dishpan helmets, Springfield rifles and puttees, and the marching band from Dedham High School, but most of all I remember the open car going slowly by, with a frail old man in the back, wearing a Civil War uniform, and gently waving a transparent, bony hand at the crowd — the last local survivor of the Grand Army of the Republic.
And I remember my own active duty Army service (1954-1961 — a rare period when Americans were not at war somewhere), which began with my feeling that my personal qualities were being recognized at last in a way I had never felt before, either in my family or in school, and ended much too long after I had recognized that as an Infantry officer my job was to lead men to kill one another up close and personal.
Those memories came back when I was a selectman in Manchester, MA (1986-91), and each year marched at the head of a parade through town, stopping at each cemetery in town, ending at one where each year the same rituals were performed: a high school student (who might soon die in Iraq or Afghanistan, but didn’t know it yet) reciting the Gettysburg address, a gray-haired former Army nurse from the American Legion Auxiliary reciting the maudlin “In Flanders’ Fields,” someone else reading a war-glorifying “Reply to ‘In Flanders’ Fields’,” a bugle blowing taps, and a ragged volley fired in salute by a squad of portly legionnaires who the other 364 days of the year were recognizably the Fire Chief, a grocery clerk, a plumber and a policeman. Then we all went to the harbor where the Auxiliary Legionnaire threw a bunch of poppies into the water (if it was low tide they lay in the mud until the tide came in). There were no GAR veterans or World War I doughboys, but a handful of WW II and Korean War veterans, and few more from the Vietnam War. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “so it goes.” But Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, right?
A few days ago I read an obituary of Paul Fussell, Jr., a clear-thinking military historian whose work I admire. He too had recalled how much he had enjoyed the infantry (he was a lieutenant in combat in France just after D-Day), until he became aware that the purpose of the infantry was to persuade young men like him to kill as many other young men like him as possible. He went on to write The Great War and Modern Memory and many other books and articles that I wish many politicians would read before they send young men and women off to yet another war.
Love and long life to all. Maybe even a few years of peace.
