Photo of the Day: Grand Army of the Republic Statue, DC

One of the things I love about Washington, DC, is that, when you visit one place, you are immediately greeted with two or three other sights that also fascinate you. So it proved when I got off at the Metro stop for the National Archives. Even before I crossed the street, I felt compelled to pull out my camera to snap right near me the Navy Memorial and what you see here.

This memorial honors not only the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) but also Dr. Benjamin F. Stephenson, who founded this most significant of the veterans’ organizations emerging from the Civil War on this day 150 years ago in Decatur, Ill.   

At the time of its creation, almost a year after the surrender at Appomattox, it was already clear that the traditional community structures for tending to the needs of war veterans were being simply overwhelmed by the scale of the conflict just concluded.

The GAR, organized for Union officers and enlisted men who had been honorably discharged, started by founding soldiers’ homes and initiating relief work and pension legislation. Before long, it wielded what Washington understands best: considerable political clout. Between 1868 and 1908, no Republican was nominated to the presidency without a GAR endorsement.

This three-sided granite monument was created by the Scottish-born sculptor John Massey Rhind and dedicated in 1909. A large bronze bas relief on this side you see depicts a Union soldier and sailor representing “Fraternity”; below them, a smaller bas relief of Stephenson, who started the war as a surgeon associated with the 14th Illinois Infantry Regiment before rising to the rank of brigade surgeon by the time he was discharged in 1864.

Bonus Quote of the Day (James Jones, on the WWII Vets, Afterward)

“So slowly it faded, leaving behind it a whole generation of men who would walk into history looking backwards, peering forever over their shoulders behind them, at their own lengthening shadows trailing across the earth. None of them would ever really get over it.” — James Jones, WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering (1975)

Today marks the 70^th anniversary of V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, the announcement that Japan would cease fighting and that WWII was effectively over. Few American households were unaffected by the experience of that conflict—and, despite the euphoria over its successful conclusion, From Here to Eternity author James Jones got it exactly right: The young men who fought to redress the catastrophic failures of two decades of diplomacy didn’t get over what they saw and experienced in the Pacific and Europe.

How could they? How could anybody?

All the more reason to honor their sacrifices—which, given the bright hopes of these youths going in, are far greater than we will ever be able to imagine.

(The image accompanying this post comes from The Best Years of Our Lives, the Oscar-winning 1946 postwar drama starring, from left to right, Harold Russell, Dana Andrews and Fredric March as veterans returning home as men changed utterly by the conflict, to a world that has altered just as significantly in their absence.)

Quote of the Day (The Duke of Wellington, on Battles Lost and Won)

“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” —The Duke of Wellington, in a dispatch of 1815, quoted in S.A. Bent, Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men (1887)

Photo of the Day: Veterans Memorial, Hilton Head SC

On Sunday, on my way to an event at Shelter Cove Community Park in Hilton Head, S.C., I came across the Veterans Memorial erected by the grateful citizens of this area. As you'll see in the photo I took, the memorial, overlooking a marsh, contains a walkway leading to a small circle with benches and four granite columns.

The site is dedicated “to all veterans who have served this country honorably, and who have helped preserve the freedoms that we enjoy in this great nation.”

I was brought up short by the inscription on the back: a list of wars not just of the 20^th but also of the 21^st centuries.  It reminded me of lives cut painfully short, in conflicts increasingly divisive. I wondered if we were doomed to endure these convulsive events, the way we seemingly are by the existence of poverty—or if a better world can somehow be wrenched by the awful sacrifices of these service personnel

Photo of the Day: Naming the Honored Dead

In one of the most searing passages in his novel about civilization’s wounds caused by WWI, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway wrote:

“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

Hemingway left out one set of “concrete names”: those of people.

Surely the simple power of names accounts for much of the massive emotion inspired by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington over the last three decades. Yet surely nearly every good-sized American town has its own smaller-scale version of this: an honor roll of local fallen heroes. More than a few of us walk by these memorials daily, paying no attention not only on most days but even on Memorial Day.

I thought of this after reading a letter to the editor this morning by a fellow member of my parish. He wrote of how a dozen of his classmates in the local high school had died in combat in WWII. I thought of them as I snapped a picture of this Memorial plaque just outside the City Hall of my hometown, Englewood, N.J. Many surviving World War II vets, like my fellow parishioner, are now in their late 80s or even 90s. Their sorrow on days such as today is surely heightened by the thought of the years of joy that their friends never got to experience.

The thought is overwhelming in commemorations like today’s: Just how much the fallen lost so that the rest of us, going forward for generations, might gain. Learning the names of the dead is laudable. Discovering the basic life facts of even one fallen brave one would be even better.

Quote of the Day (Siegfried Sassoon, on a WWI Vet’s Experience)

“Robert, there's a war in France;
Everywhere men bang and blunder,
Sweat and swear and worship Chance,
Creep and blink through cannon thunder.
Rifles crack and bullets flick,
Sing and hum like hornet-swarms.
Bones are smashed and buried quick.
Yet, through stunning battle storms,
All the while I watch the spark
Lit to guide me; for I know
Dreams will triumph, though the dark
Scowls above me where I go.”— Siegfried Sassoon, from “A Letter Home (to Robert Graves)” (1916)

On this Veteran’s Day, I think we have to do more than just mouth platitudes about honoring service personnel for their courage and bravery. Somehow, as hard as it is to conceive, we have to imagine the horrible cauldron of war through which they pass. Only then can we truly understand their sacrifice. Few veterans have fought so tenaciously--then sought to tell the world about it--with the searing power that British WWI soldier Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) summoned. This particular poem, written in May 1916 to fellow veteran Robert Graves (himself a poet-novelist-memoirist of later note), comes from the collection, The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (1919).

Bonus Quote of the Day (WWII Vet Frank Lucianna, on Why He Fought)

"We love our country and we did what we had to do for America. … It's as simple as that."—Frank Lucianna, 86, of Englewood Cliffs, NJ, summarizing why he and older brother Victor fought in the Second World War, quoted in Giovanna Fabiano, “Veterans Reflect on WWII,” The Record (Bergen County, N.J.), November 11, 2009

My local paper, The Record, had an unusually interesting story today focusing on the Lucianna brothers, who grew up in my parish, St. Cecilia’s, of Englewood, N.J., then as young men went off to battle two of the world’s great tyrannies—Nazism in Europe and the Japanese dictatorship under its premier Tojo in the South Pacific.

The Census Bureau Web site reported today that 2.6 million veterans from World War II were still alive in 2008, but those numbers are dwindling rapidly, with the article reporting that 1,000 veterans of the conflict are dying each day across the U.S.

Two of my own uncles passed away within 10 days of each other last month—and, like Frank and Victor Lucianna, they fought in Europe and the Pacific. At this point, I’m sorry I didn’t ask my uncles Ben and Al for more details while they were alive about their experiences.

I do recall my Uncle Ben telling me several years ago, “Ever since the South Pacific, I’ve felt like I’ve been living on borrowed time.” You can hear some of that same haunted note in the article, when Frank relates than more than half of his high school class died: “I think about how magnificent they were and how short their lives were.”

I’m glad the Lucianna brothers lived to tell even a part of what they went through. Whether they came back or not, the innocence of each young person who fought in that war died so that our nation could live in freedom, and extend it to others around the globe. We dare not forget those sacrifices.

Quote of the Day (Karl Shapiro, on Mourning the Military Dead)

“The time to mourn is short that best becomes

The military dead. We lift and fold the flag,

Lay bare the coffin with its written tag,

And march away. Behind, four others wait

To lift the box, the heaviest of loads.

The anesthetic afternoon benumbs,

Sickens our senses, forces back our talk.

We know that others on tomorrow's roads

Will fall, ourselves perhaps, the man beside,

Over the world the threatened, all who walk.”—Karl Shapiro, “Elegy for a Dead Soldier,” in The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, edited by Diane Ravitch (2000)

“Ever since the South Pacific,” one of my uncles told me a few years ago, “I’ve felt that every day I’ve been on borrowed time.”

I--and nearly everyone I know, my age or younger--am fortunate not to have had the kind of feeling that my uncle—who spent World War II on a PT boat—shared with the rest of the Greatest Generation that saved half the world from totalitarianism. Poet Karl Shapiro served as a medical corps clerk in the same theater of that enormous conflict as my uncle. He arrived back stateside having just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for V-Letter and Other Poems, in which “Elegy for a Dead Soldier” first appeared.

We honor the fallen comrades such as those described by Shapiro today with Memorial Day parades across the country, including one in my hometown of Englewood, N.J. (where I took the photo accompanying this post). These events provide opportunities for all kinds of people to be seen in a civic setting—politicians, city workers, ambulance corps volunteers, church workers—but veterans take center stage, as they should.

It’s easy to forget just how much such remembrances used to mean to communities such as mine. In World War II, the U.S. lost 9 soldiers per 1,000 annum; in World War I; in the Civil War (in the aftermath of which began our modern Memorial Day observances), 21.3 and 23 for the North and South, respectively.

A couple of years ago, reading an obituary of a neighbor who had moved away nearly three decades ago, I discovered that he had been one of the “tin can sailors” who had been involved in some of the most desperate combat of World War II, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

My neighbor had never breathed a word to me about it, but really, like most young kids at the time, I doubt this fact would have made much of an impression on me at the time. Today, if he were still alive, I would try to find out every detail of the battle he could comfortably tell me.

The Greatest Generation is now fading from the scene. Their stories, rich and fascinating, deserve to be preserved while that’s still possible. Oral history provides an excellent means of doing so.

One academic who has made a major contribution to the field is Professor Erin McCarthy of Columbia College Chicago. Several years ago, I took an excellent summer course on oral history with her at the Chautauqua Institution. I urge any of my readers who knows a veteran whose story should be preserved to contact her here.