Memorial Day 2021

This is my fifteenth consecutive Memorial Day message. You can find the previous fourteen at the end of this message.

 

Last year, I said I never could have imagined that I would be writing in the midst of a pandemic that caused a near virtual lockdown of the nation. Now, thankfully, we are emerging from the pandemic, in no small part due to the rapid development in 2020 of highly effective vaccines and this year to the increasing number of Americans already vaccinated.

 

While this year's message will be more personal than many others, Memorial Day, above all, is always about memory. About taking time to remember those men and women in our Armed Forces who paid the ultimate price defending our country and protecting our freedom.

 

My father, Aaron May, served in the 68^th Armored Infantry Battalion of the famed 14^th Armored Division that landed in Marseilles, France on October 29, 1944. The troops first saw combat on November 20, 1944. After 167 days of combat, the Division fired its last shots on May 2, 1945.

 

On May 2-3, 1944, after already liberating thousands of Allied prisoners of war as the Division's troops battled eastward from France and into Germany, they liberated some of the subcamps at the large Dachau Concentration Camp complex as well as other nearby camps holding Jewish prisoners. It was a full 40 years later before my father talked about what he saw, smelled, and heard at Dachau – about the unimaginably emaciated survivors who were little more than skeletons, about the unforgettable pervasive stench of death, and about the cries of desperation for help and of joy at the prospect of liberation.

 

It’s no wonder that the 14^th Armored Division quickly earned the unofficial nickname “The Liberators.” More than a half-century later, on October 22, 2002, the Secretary of the Army awarded the Division what is called a "Distinctive Designation" in recognition of its unique accomplishments. From that date on, the Division will forever be carried on the rolls of the Army as the "LIBERATORS."

 

My father made it home and was discharged in December 1945. Memorial Day is about remembering all those who did not.

 

And we’ll dishonor their sacrifice if we don’t recognize that we can continue, as the Founders put it in the Constitution’s Preamble, to seek “a more perfect Union,” without using the faults of our past, including the stain of slavery, as weapons primarily intended as wedges to divide us. Or as swords intended to diminish the force of the fundamental principles upon which America was founded – again, as the Constitution's Preamble has it, to "establish Justice" and "to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."    

 

My father and I talked often about politics. Having fought against Nazi tyranny and witnessed first-hand Nazi death camps, he was always fearful of extremes in American politics. I’m not sure whether he was familiar with Ben Franklin’s famous (but perhaps apocryphal) retort when asked by Elizabeth Powel what the Constitutional Convention had bequeathed America: "A republic, if you can keep it." But I know, based on his wartime experience and his gut instincts, that, indeed, he worried whether we could keep it.

 

During our discussions, my father often – too often I sometimes thought as a young man – said that, in America, our politics must not veer too far from the Center, that they must not lurch to the extremes.

 

From my own Center-Right perspective, I am no longer as certain as I have been throughout most of my adult life that the Center – and by that, I mean the Center-Right and the Center-Left – can hold. In my view, the mainstream media contributes, wittingly or not, to our dysfunctional politics by not calling out far-left extremism in the same way that it dwells on the far-right. Both are problematic.

 

Moreover, the metastasizing Cancel Culture, which has the effect of shrinking the public space in which matters of legitimate public concern ought to be debated, only serves to deepen our political and philosophical divisions, especially in light of the leftward bias exhibited by the dominant social media platforms in the exercise of their "cancellation" discretion.

 

In his most recent Wall Street Journal column, Daniel Henninger wrote this: "America's current waves of violence – right-wing militias, left-wing anarchists, street protesters, urban gangs, anti-Semitic assaults and solo nut cases – are pushing the country to a dangerous level of disorder."

 

Were he still living, my father would be fearful for our country's future.

 

In his Farewell Address, Ronald Reagan declared: "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I am warning of an eradication of that – of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."

 

On this Memorial Day, and every Memorial Day, we should honor all those servicemen and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice in World War II, and all of America's wars, by remembering. And by recommitting to the ideals for which they fought, and which are embodied in our Constitution: To “establish Justice” and “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” If we don't, and there is an erosion of the uniquely American spirit, they shall have died in vain.

 

I wish you and your family the best for a safe, healthy, happy, and meaningful Memorial Day!

 

PS – My past Memorial Day messages are here: 2020 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007.

 

Memorial Day 2014

Since I founded the Free State Foundation in 2006, this is the seventh Memorial Day message I’ve written. You can find links to the others at the end. More than most others, this is a bit more personal.

I want to relate two different stories from two different times – but both in the spirit of honor and remembrance on Memorial Day.

First. From 1969 – 1975, I served in the U. S. Army Reserve as a medical corpsman. After completing basic training at Fort Polk and medical corpsman training at Fort Sam Houston, aside from two weeks on duty each summer, for five and a half years I spent one weekend a month on duty, first at Womack Army Hospital at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then at Walter Reed Army Hospital in D.C. About 75% of this hospital time, especially during the first three years, consisted of cleaning and dressing all manner of wounds suffered by soldiers returning from Vietnam.

I don’t want to suggest, of course, that you need to have had this personal experience to be very troubled by the reported doctored records and delays at the Veterans Administration hospitals. But having personally seen so many soldiers returning from battle maimed, I want to say here, on Memorial Day, that whatever problems exist in the VA hospital system – and they seem serious – need to be fixed, and as quickly as possible. This should not be a partisan issue. It is rather a matter of a nation respecting and honoring the service of its veterans.

Second. My father served in the Army in WWII as a warrant officer in the 68^th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 14^th Armored Division of the Seventh Army. He was in charge of a transportation unit responsible for trucking supplies and food from behind the lines up to the front – and then bringing back the dead and wounded.

On the side of each of the trucks in my father’s unit was painted: "Norma I," "Norma II," "Norma III," "Norma IV," and so forth. Norma was my mother. She was 19 when she and my father got married a few months before he shipped out for Europe.

There is something important about the trucks named "Norma," and the men who drove the trucks. In 1997, when my father was 80 years old, he told me this story, as I related in a 1998 piece published in the Potomac Review:

Dad retuned to his suitcase and pulled out three photographic prints of his entire company, seventy-nine men in all. He pointed to a soldier next to him, a warrant officer named Norman Wemple, and in a voice with an almost imperceptible quiver, stated, “he got blown up by a direct hit in March 1945 while driving Norma II. Norman was one of my best buddies in our company and a damn good mechanic too.”

There was a sudden stillness in the room. A moment later, Dad spoke up: “I still think about how that could’ve been me instead of Norman. I was driving Norma I about fifteen yards right in front of his truck on the day he got hit, but sometimes Norman drove first and I followed him, it just depended.”

“Depended on what?”

“Depended on who got his truck started first,” Dad said.

That was what happened one day in March 1945, but it was a day just like many others in a long war in which over 400,000 Americans gave their lives in the cause of fighting tyranny. Within a month, the war in Europe finally was over. My father arrived back in the States in July 1945.

For Norman Wemple, and for all the others like him who have sacrificed their lives throughout our history in the service of our country, and for all those who have returned wounded in body or spirit, please remember and honor them this Memorial Day.

PS. Now, last. June 6 marks the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. I recently had the privilege of viewing a screening of the remarkable new movie, “D-Day Normandy 1944,” written and directed by Pascal Vuong and narrated by Tom Brokaw. You can view the trailer here. The number of surviving WWII vets is diminishing rapidly – they are dying at a rate of about 555 a day. So each new generation of Americans must be educated anew regarding the meaning of June 6, 1944, a day that Mr. Brokaw said could easily be called, “the day that saved the world.” I recommend viewing the film as one part of such education and for the sake of remembering those who died that day.

PPS. My past Memorial Day messages are here: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.