Memorial Day MEMORIAL DAY, Remembering Our Fallen Heroes

Cooking With Carlo ^ | May 23 2003 | Carlo3b

[carlo3b]

Memorial Day

Remembering Our Fallen Heroes

A Brief History of Memorial Day Decoration Day The morning of May 5, 1865. The war weary townspeople of Waterloo, New York, continued the recent Sunday ritual of placing flowers, wreaths, and crosses on the graves of their fallen soldiers in their local cemetery. Much the same was happening throughout the country, in both the Northern and Southern states, as Americans slowly healed the wounds that ravaged our young nation during the Great Civil War. That same day, Henry C. Welles, a druggist in the village of Waterloo, suggested at a social gathering that a more organized and official honor should be shown to the patriotic dead of the Civil War. That idea was embraced by those in attendance, and from there a movement began to take shape. On May 5, 1866, additional civic societies joined the procession to the three existing cemeteries and were led by veterans marching to martial music. At each cemetery there were impressive and lengthy services including speeches by General Murray and a local clergyman. The ceremonies were repeated again on May 5, 1867. The following year, Retired Major General Jonathan A. Logan planned another ceremony, this time for the soldiers who survived the war. He led the veterans through town to the cemetery to decorate their comrades' graves with flags. This group was generally referred to as the "Old Guard." It was not a happy celebration, it was a memorial. The townspeople called it Decoration Day. During that memorial ceremony, the General delivered the following proclamation excerpt; Memorial Day Retired Major General Loan's proclamation; "The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country and during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit." There are many stories as to its actual beginnings, with over two dozen cities and towns laying claim to being the birthplace of Memorial Day. There is also evidence that organized women's groups in the South were decorating graves even before the end of the Civil War. A hymn published in 1867, "Kneel Where Our Loves are Sleeping" by Nella L. Sweet, carried the dedication "To The Ladies of the South who are Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead" (Source: Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920). At the first official memorial, flowers were placed on the graves of both the Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.

Poppy Day In 1915, inspired by the poem "In Flanders Fields," Moina Michael (the mother of the Poppy) replied with her own poem: We cherish too, the Poppy red That grows on fields where valor led, It seems to signal to the skies That blood of heroes never dies. She then conceived of an idea to wear red poppies on Memorial Day in honor of those who died serving the nation during war. She was the first to wear one and sell poppies to her friends and co-workers, the money going to benefit servicemen in need. Later, Madam Guerin from France was visiting the United States and learned of this new custom started by Ms. Michael, and when she returned to France, she also made artificial red poppies to raise money for war orphaned children and widowed women. This tradition spread to other countries. In 1921, the Franco-American Children's League sold poppies nationally to benefit the war orphans of France and Belgium. The League disbanded a year later and Madam Guerin approached the VFW for help. Shortly before Memorial Day in 1922 the VFW became the first veterans' organization to nationally sell poppies. Two years later, their "Buddy" Poppy program was selling artificial poppies made by disabled veterans. In 1948 the US Post Office honored Ms. Michael for her role in founding the National Poppy movement by issuing a red 3-cent postage stamp with her likeness on it. Since the late 50's, on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the 1,200 soldiers of the 3d U.S. Infantry have placed a small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. They then patrol 24 hours a day during the weekend to ensure that each flag remains standing. The first state to officially recognize Memorial Day as a holiday was New York, in 1873. By 1890, it was recognized by all of the northern states. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I (when the holiday changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war). It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May, an official declaration passed by Congress with the National Holiday Act. Several southern states have an additional separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead: January 19 in Texas, April 26 in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi; May 10 in South Carolina; and June 3 (Jefferson Davis' birthday) in Louisiana and Tennessee. While Waterloo N.Y. was officially declared the birthplace of Memorial Day by President Lyndon Johnson in May 1966, it's difficult to prove conclusively the origins of the day. It is more likely that it had many separate beginnings.

[The Mayor]

GOD BLESS AMERICA !!

GOD BLESS OUR VETERANS !!

[Victoria Delsoul]

Thanks for posting the president's Memorial Day Proclamation. He is a remarkable man.

[carlo3b]

Your graphics are outstanding.. thanks for the post..

[Dick Bachert]

To fallen soldiers let us sing
Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
Our broken brothers let us bring
To the Mansions of the Lord

No more bleeding, no more fight
No prayers pleading through the night
Just divine embrace, eternal light
In the Mansions of the Lord

Where no mothers cry and no children weep
We will stand and guard though the angels sleep
Through the ages safely keep
The Mansions of the Lord

[desertcry]

Carlo, thanks it is a great poem and a fitting tribute to the heroic generation.

[Eaker]

Our broken brothers

[Malsua]

God Bless them all.

I have an Honest question.

Flag Etiquette states that US flags should not be flown in incliment weather.

The weather here in Jersey Monday will be what I term "pissing rain". It's not a heavy rain, it's more than a drizzle, shrug.

At any rate, Flags should not be flown during this weather and I fly my flag all the time during good weather. I Take it out in the morning, bring it in before dark and bring it in before rain/snow/etc.

Should it go out on a day where it will be spotty rain and is perhaps the most important holiday of the year to fly it?

I really havn't determined the right thing to do. Obey etiquette or memorialize despite the weather.

Thoughts?

-Mal

[Grand Old Partisan]

You and your family are Democrats?

[carlo3b]

You want the truth.....

"You can't handle the truth.  Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those wall have to be guarded by people with guns.  Who's gonna do it........?

I have a greater responsibility than any of you could possibly fathom!  You curse the marines.
You have that luxury, you have the luxury of not knowing what I know.... that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives, and my existence while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

You want me here because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.

We use words like honor, code, loyalty, we use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line!  Now I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain myself to a man that rises and sleeps under the very blanket of freedom that I provide, and then questions the matter in which I provide it!  I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way.  Otherwise I suggest you grab a weapon, and stand your post.  Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."

Courtroom monologue of Colonel Nathan Jessup, (Jack Nicholson, in one of his most striking performances of his fabled career)
A Few Good Men..

I don't know what this has to do with anything here..I just love it!! Oh well ...never mind... LOL

[Eaker]

You and your family are Democrats?

NO

We DO live in the south and have ancestors who fought on the Confederate side. I don't appreciate you making a great Memorial Day thread a war of northern aggression thread.

Good day,

Eaker

[deadhead]

You're Welcome Victoria. President Bush is a remarkable man. I have a shirt that says "Thank God for President Bush", it really irks the liberals :-)

[carlo3b]

Take a moment, and remember a soldier..

[deadhead]

Touching poem. God Bless all the "Bill's" who have served our great nation.

[carlo3b]

The Mansions of the Lord...

Thank you Dick...just wonderful..

[jellybean]

In the spring of 1998, six boys called to me from half a century ago on a distant mountain and I went there. For a few days I set aside my comfortable life--my business concerns, my life in Rye, New York--and made a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, to a primitive flyspeck island in the Pacific. There, waiting for me, was the mountain the boys had climbed in the midst of a terrible battle half a century earlier. One of them was my father. The mountain was called Suribachi; the island, Iwo Jima.

The fate of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries was being forged in blood on that island and others like it. The combatants, on either side, were kids--kids who had mostly come of age in cultures that resembled those of the nineteenth century. My young father and his five comrades were typical of these kids. Tired, scared, thirsty, brave; tiny integers in the vast confusion of war-making, trying to do their duty, trying to survive.

But something unusual happened to these six: History turned all its focus, for 1/400th of a second, on them. It froze them in an elegant instant of battle: froze them in a camera lens as they hoisted an American flag on a makeshift pole. Their collective image, blurred and indistinct yet unforgettable, became the most recognized, the most reproduced, in the history of photography. It gave them a kind of immortality--a faceless immortality. The flagraising on Iwo Jima became a symbol of the island, the mountain, the battle; of World War II; of the highest ideals of the nation, of valor incarnate. It became everything except the salvation of the boys who formed it.

Chapter opener: James Bradley on the beach of Iwo Jima, April 1998. For these six, history had a different set of agendas. Three were killed in action in the continuing battle. Of the three survivors, two were overtaken and eventually destroyed--dead of drink and heartbreak. Only one of them managed to live in peace into an advanced age. He achieved this peace by willing the past into a cave of silence.

My father, John Henry Bradley, returned home to small-town Wisconsin after the war. He shoved the mementos of his immortality into a few cardboard boxes and hid these in a closet. He married his third-grade sweetheart. He opened a funeral home; fathered eight children; joined the PTA, the Lions, the Elks; and shut out any conversation on the topic of raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

When he died in January 1994, in the town of his birth, he might have believed he was taking the unwanted story of his part in the flagraising with him to the grave, where he apparently felt it belonged. He had trained us, as children, to deflect the phone-call requests for media interviews that never diminished over the years. We were to tell the caller that our father was on a fishing trip. But John Bradley never fished. No copy of the famous photograph hung in our house.

When we did manage to extract from him a remark about the incident, his responses were short and simple and he quickly changed the subject. And this is how we Bradley children grew up: happily enough, deeply connected to our peaceful, tree-shaded town, but always with a sense of an unsolved mystery somewhere at the edges of the picture. We sensed that the outside world knew something important about him that we would never know.

For him, it was a dead issue; a boring topic. But not for the rest of us.

Me, especially.

For me, a middle child among the eight, the mystery was tantalizing. I knew from an early age that my father had been some sort of hero. My third-grade schoolteacher said so; everybody said so. I hungered to know the heroic part of my dad. But try as I might I could never get him to tell me about it.

"The real heroes of Iwo Jima," he said once, coming as close as he ever would, "are the guys who didn't come back."

John Bradley might have succeeded in taking his story to his grave had we not stumbled upon the cardboard boxes a few days after his death.

My mother and brothers Mark and Patrick were searching for my father's will in the apartment he had maintained as his private office. In a dark closet they discovered three heavy cardboard boxes, old but in good shape, stacked on top of each other. In those boxes my father had saved the many photos and documents that came his way as a flagraiser. All of us were surprised that he had saved anything at all.

Later I rummaged through the boxes. One letter caught my eye. The cancellation indicated it was mailed from Iwo Jima on February 26, 1945. A letter written by my father to his folks just three days after the flagraising.

The carefree, reassuring style of his sentences offers no hint of the hell he had just been through. He managed to sound as though he were on a rugged but enjoyable Boy Scout hike: "I'd give my left arm for a good shower and a clean shave, I have a 6 day beard. Haven't had any soap or water since I hit the beach. I never knew I could go without food, water or sleep for three days but I know now, it can be done." And then, almost as an aside, he wrote: "You know all about our battle out here. I was with the victorious [Easy Company] who reached the top of Mt. Suribachi first. I had a little to do with raising the American flag and it was the happiest moment of my life."

The "happiest moment" of his life! What a shock to read that. I wept as I realized the flagraising had been a happy moment for him as a twenty-one-year-old. What happened in the intervening years to cause his silence?

Reading my father's letter made the flagraising photo somehow come alive in my imagination. Over the next few weeks I found myself staring at the photo on my office wall, daydreaming. Who were those boys with their hands on that pole? I wondered. Were they like my father? Had they known one another before that moment or were they strangers, united by a common duty? Did they joke with one another? Did they have nicknames? Was the flagraising "the happiest moment" of each of their lives?

The quest to answer those questions consumed four years. At its outset I could not have told you if there were five or six flagraisers in that photograph. Certainly I did not know the names of the three who died during the battle.

By its conclusion, I knew each of them like I know my brothers, like I know my high-school chums. And I had grown to love them.

What I discovered on that quest forms the content of this book. The quest ended, symbolically, with my own pilgrimage to Iwo Jima.

-James Bradley from the book, Flags Of Our Fathers.

[Robert Drobot]

"....If We Don't Care Who Will...."

TO THOSE WHO DIED THAT WE MIGHT LIVE

You gave your life to sustain a belief that the Creator formed this nation wherein each of us and all of us are blessed by Him with freedoms no man or government can take away.
In your rest, strengthen our resolve to protect
our faith,
our family and
our nation
from the internal and external forces that would
smash our places of worship,
deny the family as the primary source for setting standards of religious and cultural values, and
steal our freedoms through deception and force of arms.

[Dick Bachert]

Carlo,
Thank YOU for YOUR efforts to assure that those who gave their lives for the freedoms we enjoy are remembered and honored.

Just so you will know, "The Mansions of The Lord" was first used at the end of the splendid Mel Gibson film "We Were Soldiers." If you have NOT seen it, I urge you to do so. It will be a very emotional experience.

Perhaps this paricular story of the valor and sacrifice of American fighting men touched me so because I was training kids to be combat engineers at Ft. Belvoir, Va between 1962 to 1966. Many of them wound up in Vietnam. Some of them found their way to The Wall (which I STILL cannot bring myself to visit).

Director Randall Wallace and Music Director Nick Glennie Smith searched for the US Army counterpart to the beautiful and haunting "Navy Hymn" (which, because I was at the Kennedy funeral, STILL rings in my ears) and could not find one. So they WROTE "Mansions" and use it (sung by the West Point Glee Club) as the credits roll. The melody is used during the film as well, but the audience at the screening I attended sat motionless as the words and music enveloped us.

I shall probably watch my DVD version of it today. And I will again be moved to tears...

[M.K. Borders]

I'll post this in respectful memory of William (Jack)Bradly Borders, E-6 Indiana Air National Guard [retired].
Formally of the 8th Airforce in WWII. Flew the required missions first as a tail gunner/armour for a B-17 crew, then later on a B-24.

Jack died on Christmas Day 2001.
He was never wealthy
Never traveled
Never tried to "climb" the latter
Though an intelligent man, he worked at simple physical jobs.
He held no elected office, nor was he a leader in his community.
Yet when he died, the funeral home was standing room only every time it was open.

I think my Uncle was a better man than most.
I think my Uncle was a better man than me.

[carlo3b]

Good morning to everyone. A Good morning hug to my dear Jelly. Thank you for your service, and for sharing the touching Flags Of Our Fathers.. 

Morn' Dansangel, a extra special cup of java to you and 45MAN.

And to all of our active duty and former military, that willingly placed their live at the ready in the service of their country.

Wake up JIM, LADYX, and RONNIE...and oh so many FReepers that served. Please help us wake everyone up that served, you know who you are and who is missing this wonderful but sad morning. TODAY is in your and their HONOR!

But today, especially today, to all of our brave HERO'S that paid the full price, so we could enjoy the cheap seats, I am, and will always  be eternally grateful, and take to my knee each night, in their memory.

Well today, more than any other day is a Memorial Day in their honor.  Today we REMEMBER those dear souls collectively, and individually. THANK YOU ALL, those that are at rest, near and far... sleep a hero's sleep, we now watch over you..

GOD BLESS YOU ALL.. we promise to never forget.  ATTENTION...... SALUTE!!

 
 

[jellybean]

The Ballad Of Chosin

  -By Frank G. Gross

The nights are cold in Korean soil
But the nights been cold before
And its not so hard in your own back yard
To be set for peace or war
But in history there's a chapter
Of a place called Valley Forge
Repeated one December
On the Chosin Reservoir

They had us all surrounded
I could hear them scream and yell
My feelings at that moment
No tongue could ever tell
I saw the bursting mortar shells
And the bullets around me flew
As all my strength had left me
And all my courage too

But with the breaking of the morning
just before the dawn
I heard the sounding bugles
And the big attack was on
The cotton quilted uniforms
Against our bullet spree
The screaming yelling banzai
They called the human sea

Baby faces bearded
and chapped with hardened mud
Parkas that were dirty
And stained with frozen blood
Here a bunch of youngsters
Who fought on to the end
In the battle of the Chosin
Where boys were changed to men

Twelve long miles of convoy
Headed for the sea
Roadblocks at every turning
Down through Koto-ri
The frost bite and the wounded
The dead and dying too
No matter what the objective be
These boys were going through

The captain he informed us
Perhaps he thought it right
Before we reach the river boys
Were going to have to fight
But we're going out like marines
In an organized withdraw
And no matter what the rumors say
Its no retreat at all

We fought at least nine hours
Before the strife was ore
And the like of dead and wounded
I've never seen before
But the ever lasting promise
Kept along each bloody yard
No one leaves behind the wounded
Cause there ain't no fight that hard

The chaplain collected dog tags
In his hands were quite a few
There was Captain Smith's McCloskies
And corporal Bryan's too
But before we reached the river
And fought our way back through
The sergeant had the dog tags
And he had the chaplain's too

If I made you pause one moment
And take a little time
Then I know it wasn't just in vain
That I put these words to rhyme
For there's just to many people
Who take this all in stride
They hear these tales of battle
Then cast it all aside

Oh the nights were cold in Korean soil
But the nights been cold before