Remembering those devotions for our freedoms

By PHILIP GAILEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 28, 2000

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a time to pause and reflect on the valor and sacrifice of the men and women who have died in military service for their country. For many Americans, this is the weekend that marks the beginning of summer. It is a time for cookouts and lazy family outings. There is no cause to feel guilty about enjoying our freedom and prosperity as long as we take a moment to remember those Americans who gave what Abraham Lincoln called their "last full measure of devotion." We owe them nothing less than our respect and gratitude, silent or spoken, this one day out of the year.

In small towns and cities, there will be parades and ceremonies to remember the dead. Veterans will squeeze into those parts of their old uniforms that still fit -- for some that will be a military cap -- and stiffly raise their hands in a salute to their fallen comrades. Wreaths will be laid at memorials and on individual graves in cemeteries across the land. In Washington, that V-shaped, black wall that is the Vietnam Memorial will be a scene of pain and rememberance as families, friends and old comrades reach out to touch the chiseled names of some of the 58,000 Americans who died in that undeclared war.

On this weekend, I find myself thinking not only about those men and women who fought and died for their country but of the parents and loved ones they left behind. How can we not remember the young draftees and volunteers -- too young to buy a six-pack of beer but not too young to die -- who went off to foreign battlefields knowing they might never come home? But this year, for the first time, I also am thinking of the families who watched their young sons, husbands and fathers march off to war. Many soldiers gave their lives for their country, but their mothers and fathers gave something they valued even more than their own lives.

Last October our son turned 18, and although there is no longer a military draft, he was required by law to register with the Selective Service. That's when it finally hit me. I try to imagine what must it have been like for all those fathers and mothers who hugged their sons goodbye at train stations and bus depots. For many, there would be no reunion. Their sons, including many 18-year-olds, were off to fight against a foreign enemy. They saw it as their duty to country, even when they harbored doubts about the cause for which they were asked to risk their lives.

Like most fathers, I find it hard to think of my son as a warrior at his age. Friday night was his senior prom, and on June 9 he will graduate from high school. In the fall, he will be off to college in the Northeast. I already am dreading that day when we pack up the car and head for New Jersey. Mentally, I am trying to prepare myself for the empty nest. Of course, I would have it no other way. While I am grateful his future does not include combat training, I also wonder if his generation will feel an obligation to serve their country in other ways.

He is a young man now, independent and full of spunk and physically stronger than I am, thinking about a future that does not include fighting a war or even keeping the peace in some faraway hot spot. I don't have to worry that he will be drafted, unless there is a national emergency, and I don't have to lie awake at night wondering if he will step on a land mine, fall victim to a sniper's bullet or come home missing a leg or an arm. These days, my worst nightmare is that he could become a traffic fatality.

Those who have seen the movie Saving Private Ryan or have read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation better understand the horrors of war and the sacrifice of American soldiers in battle. But do we fully appreciate the anguish and suffering of the families they left at home? They deserved their own medals for wounds to the heart that will never heal completely.

In an essay in Time magazine last week, historian Douglas Brinkley quoted from a letter that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, wrote to his wife a few weeks before the D-Day invasion in 1944 about the "sad business" of signing condolence letters to the families of the dead. He wrote: "A man must develop a veneer of callousness that lets him consider such things dispassionately, but he can never escape a recognition of the fact that back home the news brings anguish and suffering to families all over the country. . . . War demands real toughness of fiber -- not only in the soldiers (who) must endure, but in the homes that must sacrifice their best."

On this Memorial Day, let us remember the courage and sacrifice of the soldiers who never came home, and of the loved ones who sent their best to war.

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