OutTakes
by Edd Merritt

Where Does the Memorial Fit in Memorial Day?

In my last column I begged off from matters of the mind to focus, instead, on matters of the senses. A beautiful spring day on the Demeter property had corralled me.
Well, today, it’s raining, and my mind is back languishing in damper stuff. It’s also the weekend after Memorial Day, and I’m growing fed up with war stories in the media.
You know, America hasn’t had a lot of luck in winning wars recently, and I’m not even sure how war, defined in my Webster’s as “open armed conflict between countries or factions within countries,” fits tightly into what’s happening around the world. Factions within countries seem closer to the true structure, in the U.S. as elsewhere.
Death does seem to be a constant. But even its circumstances hold different meanings for different folks. I happen to think that the main purpose behind our choosing to remember the dead in this country is to help us, the living, deal better with our own guilt. I know there are those who believe strongly that in order to maintain the empire, certain people may have to die. (At least three generations of military-academy-McCains fall into that category.) What I can’t comprehend in their reasoning is the basis for their certainty about the necessity to kill or be killed.
Some cultures, apparently, don’t separate life from death, so it doesn’t matter what happens to you – suicide, shmuicide. That’s also a tough notion for me to comprehend, but it’s one that seems central to what western soldiers face daily in the hills of Afghanistan.
I must admit that I also am of an era where the absurdity of human nature was an ongoing theme in literature. Authors and playwrights wrote tomes about the futility of trying to bring rationality to man’s status in the universe. Our lives play out as theater of the absurd. We’re a flock of Samuel Beckett’s Vladimirs and Estragons, just hanging out, waiting for Godot.
I don’t celebrate Memorial Day, because celebration, to me, means glorifying something we want to eliminate. I can’t glorify an untimely death. Dead is dead – not a continuation, not a beginning – it’s ashes to ashes. It’s physical decay. All other explanations only assuage the living. Life is a sexually transmitted fatal disease, but don’t short-cut it.
That’s why I’m uneasy with a couple of things that I’ve noticed happening locally. One occurred on the front page of the Vermont section of the Burlington Free Press on Memorial Day. It was entitled “Remember,” and, among other things, it listed numbers of Vermonters killed in wars dating back to the early 1860s. The section on the Vietnam War was particularly poignant. That was my war, and I didn’t follow my conscience. I served in it. So did 58,000 others who didn’t come home to live out their lives.
Our use of monuments generated my other recent concern about memorializing war. I say this with my wife serving on Charlotte’s Monument Committee, looking for ways to provide better placement of the War Memorial at the corner of Greenbush and Ferry Roads.
I don’t question having a monument there. My question is about what it commemorates. Although it memorializes those individuals who gave up their lives for a cause, they lost everything. By building works of art, do we dignify war, keep it alive as a visible institution, one to which we turn before attempting other solutions?
Can we remember those we lost without constructing stone effigies? Moreover, shouldn’t we also remember the bravery it took for those who chose not to serve? They gave up freedoms for their consciences. I know individuals in Charlotte who did both, serving in current conflicts, then saying no, enough is enough when they were asked to go back again.. That, to my mind, takes real courage. Unfortunately, to the military mind, it deserves less-than-honorable discharge.
Conscience was a trait our last president lacked. He did have daddy sniffing around Washington, however, so he needn’t worry about losing the ranch. However, the hackles on my neck stand with his inability see the gross moral dichotomy between dodging the Vietnam draft himself then sending others to die in Iraq. I see absolutely no integrity in his actions.
A couple of years ago, G.B. Trudeau, author of the cartoon Doonesbury, questioned the reasoning behind continuing to supply our troops in Iraq under the guise of supporting them. In the strip the rookie soldier asks his sergeant, “I’m not quite sure I understand how cutting off war funds is ‘not supporting the troops.’ Does it mean we’d be stranded here without food and weapons?”
Sarge replies, “No, it means we’d have to withdraw.”
“Really,” says the rookie, “so if Congress doesn’t support the troops, I go home to my family. Otherwise, it’s back to the meat grinder.”
Rookie again, after a short pause, “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. . .” to which Sarge responds, “Permission to think it through denied.”
I’m working on my three-year-old grandkids now, and I sense they’re on the right track. “So, you want to become a soldier when you grow up?”
“Uuuummmm . . .no. Wanna be American Idol, Grampy.”

Bring out your dead!
Bring out your dead!
Wait, I’m not dead yet!
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail