It's another Memorial Day... A few parades (fewer each year) attended by a dwindling group of
survivors, men and women who served in this country's military sojurns across the globe and across the decades...a salute to their nobility and sacrifice, and to those who were left on the battlefields...
My wife Lisa called her Uncle Al in Albuquerque to thank him for his service...he was a colonel in WWII and Korea in the Army Air Corps and, like my father, survived those conflicts to return to a grateful America rife with parades and waving flags and cheering crowds. She thanked him for his sacrifice for our nation, and remembered her adoptive dad who served in the Pacific on board naval ships during Iwo Jima and Saipan, and mentioned me for my service during Viet Nam. Uncle Al was deeply touched, and then fell very silent. When he was finally able to speak again, he said "nobody thanks us anymore...they don't seem to care anymore..."
Lisa came to me and said she was shocked and troubled by this lack of gratitude. I, however, was
only too aware of this trend. I returned to a nation which spit on me and my comrades in airports,
and looked upon us (especially post-My Lai) as "baby-killers." But then, in the 80's (almost two decades after my service), they staged a massive celebration for us with a parade down Wall Street (we were--mostly--still young enough then to make the route on foot) and crowds and streamers and marching bands. It was gratifying, if late in coming.
There was one great difference between then and now: namely, the demographics of those serving in the military. Viet Nam was the end of the draft and, hence, the end of the era of the citizen soldier. Men of every walk of life and every strata of economic class served together in that, and preceding, conflict. This is no longer the case.
Today, our army, navy and air forces are peopled by "volunteers", a pseudonym for people who--due to their lack of access to economic or educational opportunity--are facing such limited options that they have no choice but to enter the military. Once there, they are further enslaved by a system which does not--as it did in my day--release them from their service obligation after 2, 4 or 6 years of active duty, but rather keeps them in a loop of continuous service in the "reserves"...sending them back into war zone peril for second, third, fourth and fifth tours.
Unless and until the draft is reinstated, and the burden of sending their progeny into
harm's way is shared equally by all American families--regardless of their economic status--there will never be enough people saying "thank you" on Memorial Day. Defending this nation will be "someone else's job" and, like the maintenance crew which cleans your office bathrooms, will go mainly ignored.
God bless us all, and rest well all those who did not return.
