Duty and Sacrifice - Memorial Day is not about death. It is about duty.

For the majority of Americans, Memorial Day is first and foremost a three-day weekend. Time to watch the Indianapolis 500 or a baseball game; time to open the swimming pool or have a picnic. The American flag will be appropriated to embellish ads for supermarkets, department stores, car dealers, and home improvement centers. Sales on everything from garden fertilizer to bedroom furniture will be accompanied by perfunctory messages urging us to “remember those who died for our country” as we clip our coupons and make our way to the mall. The nearest most folks will get to any graveyard, let alone a military cemetery, is a file photo in the local newspaper or obligatory footage on the television news.

It is perhaps inevitable that days set aside for even the most poignant purposes soon become mere “holidays.” The majority of people observe them as such, ignoring even their rote civic rituals. So it is with Memorial Day. Only a relatively small core of people–veterans, those still in the military, their relatives, a cadre of willing, obliged, or calculating politicians, and those citizens who retain a vestigial sense of tradition or patriotism–plan and participate in its observation.

At our cemetery on the hill above Ligonier, Pennsylvania, the observation has already begun. The folks from the veterans’ organizations have walked the rows and planted fresh American flags at the graves of their comrades. You can see hundreds of them fluttering in the sunlight or soaking limply in the rain, and there are thousands more, millions more, in cemeteries all across the United States. And in U.S. military cemeteries all over the world, the marshaled lines of simple stones stand as milestones marking the endless road of duty.

It is a time to remember that who we are and what we are as a nation unique in history has depended on our sense of duty and its inevitable call to sacrifice.

And while the particular duty–the often perilous duty–of defending our country is accepted by the professional soldier, it has often been imposed on many others and carried out reluctantly and with trepidation. For most, this duty has meant the sacrifice of time–“the best years of our lives”—and of broken bodies. But for many others it has meant a sacrifice of life itself.

It is easy to forget what those gravestones and fluttering flags mean; easy to fly on past the cemetery, headed for the lake or ball game without giving it a thought. I’ve been no better than most about this. So in recent years, I have made it a point to remember. I drive up to the Ligonier Valley Cemetery on or around Memorial Day. I park on the narrow road below Section D and walk up the grassy, flag-bedecked slope to row 4. There at my feet are two small rectangles of granite. Incised on the larger, older one is the inscription:

A few feet below this monument, a newer, smaller stone, emplaced years later, bears Staff Sergeant Carey’s name and the words CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR. I never look down at those gray rectangles set against the green grass without my mind rushing back to a hot day in July 1948 when, as a little boy, I sat in a church pew transfixed by something I had never seen before–a coffin covered completely by a fresh new American flag.

Alvin Carey, quiet, bookish Alvin Carey, had come home. His body had been removed from a military grave in France and brought back to the green and forested valley he loved. I remember little about that day except my restlessness in the heat and the creaking sound of the floor and wooden pews in Laughlintown Christian Church as I stared at that flag-draped coffin and tried to imagine a soldier inside. It would be many, many years before I understood who he was and what he had done.

Today, the high school building in Ligonier is named after him and the road leading to it is called Carey School Road. But many people have no idea of the significance of the name. Alvin Carey was a handsome, brainy kid from the nearby village of Laughlintown. He was a voracious reader and by all reports a natural athlete, excelling in football and baseball. Going on to college in those Depression years after his high school graduation in 1935 was out of the question. So he worked at various jobs around Ligonier until, in January 1941, he joined the U.S. Army. By the end of that year, Pearl Harbor had been attacked and the United States was at war.

And so it was that on an August day in 1944, near the French village of Plougastel, Sgt. Carey, commanding a machine gun squad, found himself and his men pinned down by withering fire from German troops in and around a concrete pillbox high on a hill called 154. We will never know what went through Carey’s mind as machine gun bullets poured down on his exposed position 200 yards below that pillbox. He had placed his guns as best he could to return fire and tried to find what shelter he could for his men. He had done his duty.

But as the fire continued, Carey crawled quickly among his men, gathering up as many hand grenades as he could stuff in his pockets and belt. Then, armed with the grenades and his M1 carbine, he began crawling up that hill toward the distant pillbox.

Killing one German infantryman who suddenly confronted him, Carey finally managed to reach a point just under the incessant muzzle flashes bursting from the narrow slit in the concrete face of the pillbox. He began throwing his grenades. He was trying to aim them directly into the slit where the German machine guns played back and forth. To do so he had to expose himself directly to the fire.

Machine gun bullets tore into his body, knocking him back. He got up. With his life fast bleeding out of his shattered body, he got up. In the crisp, spare words of his Medal of Honor citation, “Undaunted, he gathered his strength and continued his grenade attack.” Carey, a pretty good baseball player, finally pitched one grenade through the slit straight into the pillbox, killing the crew and silencing the guns. Then he fell dead. Stunned by what they had just seen, the men of the 38th rushed up Hill 154 and ended German resistance in that area.

Medal of Honor citations are notably chaste in their narration, so we can only guess Carey’s state of mind when, with “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life,” he went beyond the edge of duty that long ago August day. Whatever the combination of calculation and inchoate fear and anger within him, it is doubtful that the words duty or sacrifice or any thoughts connected with them crossed his mind.

But the sense was there. The sense that this thing had to be done, and Carey was there to do it. And thus, on an obscure hill by a tiny village in Brittany, he fulfilled his duty and went beyond—to the ultimate sacrifice.

You may have your own personal touchstone to remember Memorial Day. A friend or relative lost in Afghanistan or Iraq, or on the high seas, or in the air. Perhaps someone who never returned from Korea or Vietnam, or the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Remember them. Give thanks for them. Consider, for a few moments, the cost of duty.

If no such personal connection exists, go and visit a cemetery. Go to those little flags fluttering by the stones. Pick out one, or just consider the hundreds, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, that mark the long road of duty… and of sacrifice.

FURTHER READING: Bennett also writes “Remembering: With Pain, Anger, and Vigilance,” “This Astounding Enterprise,” and “Funny Thing about Christmas.” Thomas Donnelly, Gary J. Schmitt, and Mackenzie Eaglen contribute “Defending Defense: Sequestration Must be Stopped.” Mackenzie Eaglen says “Entitlement Programs, not Defense, the Source of Deficit Crisis.” John R. Bolton claims “The Choice is Clear: Romney Will Keep Us Safer.”

And there’s surely an aspect we didn’t see in the popular treatment. Almost all who dared risk their earthly lives in that fashion believed firmly that another life was to follow, a permanent one, into which the God-inspired achievements of this life would be mirrored as rewards.

Turning memorial day into a drunken holiday angers me like nothing else. I usually work, but the endless hurrah barbecues just don’t sit right with me. I know families like to spend days off together relaxing, but would it hurt to a couple of hours to honor the sacrifice? No one has drunken barbecues on Easter.. so why memorial day? I am not against bbq or drinking.

Gonna spend some time reflecting and praying, then off to the shooting range...

....saw the reference to a cementery in Ligonier, PA...
just down the road from my cabin in the mountains. I will
make it a point to visit this special gravesite and say
my prayers! I have played taps at the Snowball Hill
cementery near Rector but never in that location. The
Honor Guard from the Donegal American Legion has
participated in 6 events so far , with 2 more planned for
the weekend. It is amazing—the general lack of interest
shown by the public in general!!!
MAY GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!

“Memorial Day is also about a grateful nation.”

Each year I remember the vets who had a hands on approach to every aspect of their peacetime communities, and all for the good. A WWI vet who taught me how to fish; a WWII vet who taught me how to pack, hike, and camp with low visibility, a Korean War vet and former POW (Chosin Reservoir) who taught me to NEVER accept a superficial assessment of any situation, claim, document or authority;
a Vietnam vet who taught me how to make scale models from scratch. These are just a very, very few of those I recall.

Most of all I remember my dad. So many of those guys taught me ‘dad’ things in his absence, as he was gone half the time helping to win the Cold War on five different continents. I always sulked when he was TDY, feeling very hard done by, and never thought until after he passed away how much he missed home, but never whined about it.

I don’t think most veterans’ service to the their nation and their people ends in the military. It begins there.

For those who have passed, may God keep, comfort and restore you.

For those still living, may God bless and keep you, and show you how appreciated and beloved you are.

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It’s right I think to honor our military. At the same time, I know that the families of our troops have a life different from everyone else. We don’t thank them for their service, but it never hurts to think of the cost to family that the military life entails.

Your post about growing up military isn’t just you. Go to the above link for a song about growing up a military brat. Go down to the song entitled “For the brats”.

It plays there for free, so don’t think this is some kind of come on to buy anything. Fair disclosure: it is written by my son and from his band.

There is, I repeat, ZERO cost. Just click the “for the brats” link.

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