Memorial Day, Plus One

Yesterday, the wife I attended our small town’s annual parade, with flags and dogs and school kids and a ceremonial salute by a motley squad of vets shooting blanks. Could I see all this in the context of so-often-bruited-as-imminent civil war? No, I couldn’t, but I felt obliged to write something edgy about it. Then I read the tribute by my fellow substacker Lucian K. Truscott IV to his "Grandpa," the late Lt. General Lucian K. Truscott Jr.

            Lucian IV writes that his Grandpa was "a hard man." Bill Mauldin, the great down-with-the-troops battlefield reporter, said Gen. Truscott "could have eaten a ham like Patton for breakfast any morning, and picked his teeth with the  man's pearl-handled pistols." Grandpa replaced Patton after the latter was relieved of command for making anti-semitic remarks. Grandpa saw to it that the army served concentration-camp survivors respectfully.

            Before that, Grandpa led troops through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy, and on Memorial Day 1945 he made a speech. Turning away frrom the front-row VIPs, he faced the 20,000 graves behind him, and apologized if anything he had done had made their deaths more likely. He said, according to Mauldin, who was there, "he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed if you were in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the best he could do."

            Lucian IV's heartfelt post ends in a wrenching encounter between Lucian III, about to go to war himself in Korea, and Grandpa, who had served with valor and responsible sensitivity in a war that could with justice claim to be in defense of democracy and in response to Holocaust, but who had been left "a broken man" by what he had seen. You should look it up.

And let us all gravitate toward local, service-oriented associations, that do not lead us toward internecine strife:

      My uncle belongs to this coterie,

      An offshoot I guess of the Rotary,

               Who’ve all sworn fealty

               To Ed of Ed’s Realty

      And Marv if you’re needing a notary.

Furthermore, let us keep our paranoia in perspective:

    Of the forces confronting Pierre,

   Which are vicious and never fight fair,

              Some are statistical,

             Others more mystical,

   And none of them know he is there.

In time, we may be able to look back on these days fondly:

“When all’s said and done,” says Bart,

“I may not be really so smart,

          But I’ll tell you one thing:

          That ‘all said and done’ thing?

That is my favorite part.”