hell is war

Thinking about Memorial Day -- my earliest, and strongest, memories of this patriotic tradition involve my bike -- the children in Mineral City, Ohio, decorated our bicycles and then rode them (or led them, I'm not sure...) in a parade.  I think maybe, actually, the first parade or two, I just walked, come to think about it -- and the decorating of our bikes came in the next few years, in Mineral City, and then in Rootstown, Ohio. 


We were all given red, white, and blue crepe paper -- long rolls of it, and we wove it, by hand, in and out, in and out, and around the spokes in the bicycle wheels.  Then when you rode the bike, or walked it, (because the parade would only go "so" fast)...the wheels would turn and there was a pleasing, patriotic, red-white-and-blue blur in our bike tires.


In Mineral City, where I think I just walked proudly in the parade, bikeless, in first grade, or K, there was a marching band.  I remember being allowed to walk alongside a couple of teen-aged girls who had their uniforms on, and were carrying their instruments, en route to assemble with the band.  I think I knew them because one had baby-sat me, & one was from church.  It felt pretty neat, to walk with the big kids.



I remember the responsibility of carrying a flag (just like the ones in the picture above, I think, but a smaller size, maybe) -- the wooden stick-handle...and the flag was "not a toy" and you "never let it touch-the-ground"! 


I think even as such a little child, I had an instinctive understanding that if anyone ever really let the flag touch the ground, our country would not -- I don't know -- explode, or disappear or something.  I knew, or figured out, that the flag couldn't touch the ground because it was respectful, and the right thing to do, to hold it upright.  Ritual.  Symbolism.  (My bike!!)


I started thinking about my family, and relatives who went to war:
my dad, W.W. II
two cousins, Vietnam
and
three or four uncles, W.W. II.


They all went to war, and they all came back.


When I asked my dad what he did in the war, he answered, "We helped build the Burma Road." 



And he was a "medic" who gave -- I don't know, shots, or pills, so that people would not get malaria.  My father was a good conversationalist -- a talker, a reader, informally a student of languages -- a person who appreciated words.  But he did not have a lot of words to say about the war.  Not many stories. 


None of my family members had a military career.  They just signed up to do the job that had to be done, at the time, and afterwards went to college, began careers, and got married and had families.  One of my uncles got married and then built the family home.  With his -- like -- hands -- ...I guess....I was pretty impressed with that.  And they still live in it; it's a pretty house -- I like it.


John ("Jack") Kennedy was in the same "theater" of the second world war as my father -- the "Pacific Theater."





I have the impression that in this day and age, Memorial Day does not involve, most places, a big parade attended or participated in by everyone in town, like it did when I was little, and decorated my bike with pride and excitement, for that one Big Day. 


I wonder if maybe a bigger thing was made of Memorial Day, back then, because we were only 21 years down the road from the end of WWII, the biggest conflict in history of mankind.  The people running things were the WWII vets and their wives.  The shadow of that event loomed large, and we lived daily with the after-effects:  the Cold War, the possibility of nuclear destruction.  And the growing, and seemingly open-ended, U.S. involvement in Vietnam.


"Hogan's Heroes" was and is, objectively, a well-written and funny show.  But I remember when it was on TV in our living room, once, and my dad saying, in disapproving tones, "Yeah--a funny Nazi prison camp. ..."   


It probably seemed a little too early to laugh, for many people...  That's part of what Entertainment and the Arts do -- they push us to look at things differently, to laugh at things, to go forward and be strong and not let stuff get us down...but when they "push," sometimes it's too soon.  For some folks.  That's the meaning of "push."  If it wasn't too soon for some people, it wouldn't be "pushing," it would just be Doing Things.  And Saying them.


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