Memorial Day 2000

In May, 2000, I was asked to deliver the Memorial Day speech at my town's parade. Harpswell is a small town of about 5,000, and the speech is delivered from the front of the Old Town Meeting House which was constructed in 1758. It is truly a Norman Rockwell event.
I would like to dedicate my remarks today to Sp4 Clark Douglas of Corning, NY; John Michael Rice of Indianapolis, Indiana; and LT. Brian J. O’Callahan of Alexandria, VA, three friends who will always remain young men in my heart, but who so richly deserved to go on to raise families and suffer the indignities of aging.
People began gathering together on this day, on what was known as Decoration Day to honor the fallen of the Civil War, those brave men, who rushed naively to the colors to save the Union and rid our country of the scourge of slavery. Once they had enlisted, most wondered almost immediately what they had gotten themselves into, and once they “saw the elephant,” their term for going into combat for the first time, they realized that dying for one’s country is not particularly glorious, and they never wanted to see it again.
But war did come again, and the armies passed on in time. We now honor the fallen of many wars and conflicts. The grand armies which spread out across the continent in the struggle to save the Union have become ranks of moss covered headstones. The endless lines of marching men, who fought the First World War from Flanders to the Pacific are now by a faint whisper in time, and the great armies which defended our country from the threat of fascism and communism in Korea are now in the winter years of their lives, and their stories are too quickly falling silent. Even the young men from Vietnam, who invaded the evening news, are nearing the autumn of their lives.
The real tragedy of the losses in all these wars is not so much the loss of the individual, who as the armies pass, is relegated to old photograph albums, remembered by a decreasing few, until none remain who knew him at all. The real tragedy is the loss of potential. We know not what great piece of literature bled away, unwritten, in the trenches of France, or what medical discovery was lost with the life of a young soldier on Okinawa or even Stalingrad, or what technological breakthrough was lost in the Mekong Delta. Perhaps an unborn descendent of one of the lost ones would have had the cure for AIDS or the knowledge of controlling fusion. We will never know what might have been.
If the sacrifice of our fallen brothers and sisters is to have any meaning in a world becoming increasingly smaller, we must also remember those others who fell wearing the jackets of field gray, wearing sandals made from old tires or who were incinerated in their tanks on their desperate retreat back to Bagdad, for like our own, they too had their hopes, their dreams, and their potential for good.
Some would say that on a day when we wrap ourselves in our flag, that what I have just said is inappropriate, but it is fitting and proper that we do this. One of the stories of the early celebrations of Decoration Day tells of a cemetery in which were buried both Union and Confederate dead. The graves of the Union soldiers had been covered with flowers by their loved ones, but when the families of the Confederates approached the local commandant to ask if they could place flowers on the graves of their loved ones, permission was denied.
During the night a breeze arose which blew the flowers from the Union graves, and in the morning the previously unadorned Confederate graves were covered with flowers, a tribute, many said from the Union fallen to their Southern brothers in arms.
In remembering all, we can protect the future and thereby honor the sacrifice of our own.