What we owe United States veterans of war has changed since the original Decoration Day honoring Civil War dead.
Dr. Ronald Glasser writes on the evolution of Memorial Day:
The history of Memorial Day is as tortuous as our wars. Officially proclaimed by General John Logan, the Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic in his General Order No. 11, the holiday was first observed on 30, May 1868 with flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. Over the years Memorial Day morphed into “Decoration Day” with Poppies sold on street corners eventually becoming confused with Armistice Day that later became Veteran’s Day. What is clear is that whatever the name, the once traditional observance of Memorial Day has diminished over the years. The graves of those who have died in our wars are increasingly ignored while some twenty years ago the Poppies have disappeared from our sidewalks. . Today we don’t quite know what to do with our veterans…alive or dead.
But this lack of involvement is not that we don’t care as much as a result of how our wars have changed and with though changes our own feelings and attentiveness. A Memorial Day proclaimed after the Civil War ended resonated throughout the country. It was a time to remember because for so many there was to be no future. The numbers of deaths were both stunning and unimaginable.
Our Civil War was the first great war after the industrial revolution and slaughter was on an industrial scale. Visitors from Europe were appalled and amazed at the number of death….Twenty five thousand at Shiloh…forty thousand within the first day at Antietam…a whole division sacrificed in half an hour at Gettysburg.
During the Civil War the ratio of casualties to deaths was .7 to 1. In short if you were wounded you stood a better chance of dying then of living. So a Memorial Day was not an affectation it was a real moment of grief and resolve for a whole nation but certainly for what remained of an army told to finally step down. A Memorial Day with flowers and flags placed on graves was both appropriate and meaningful. If you knew a veteran and virtually everyone did, he was most likely dead. Death had to be acknowledged. In Memoriam worked.
Thirty years later survival was still limited. In World War I with machine guns death was still the main wound with somewhere above 2.2 survivors for each death. In World War II with penicillin and plasma concentrates available survival improved and by Vietnam survival of the wounded was up considerably. In fact if you made it to the Medevac still alive with the new advances in vascular grafts and orthopedic techniques the chances were that you would make it home.
But Iraq and Afghanistan were game changers. In our latest two wars the number of casualties to those killed had become a stunning 16 to 1. Part were the types of wounds. In the Civil War, World War I and II, Korea and Vietnam you were shot while in Iraq and Afghanistan you are blown up. Different wars…different wounds. Indeed every war has its signature wound…and in Iraq and Afghanistan it is the Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD and amputations. There was to be no wall with the names of almost 54,000 names etched into black marble for these wars.
No poet today could or would write what was written in 1917 by the British poet Rupert Brooke: “If I should die /think only this of me/ that there’s some corner of a foreign field/ that is forever England/ There shall be in that earth a richer crust concealed…” Memorial poems don’t work any better then Memorial Days when the casualties of our wars are not yet in their graves but still walk among us. As another poet would state: “ And not in single file but in battalions borne”.
Like the staggering numbers of death in the Civil War there are a staggering number of walking wounded only these carry the hidden wounds. Right now a conservative estimate is that over 400,000 of those men and women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade have come home with a diagnosis of TBI (traumatic brain injury) and PTSD and that number excludes those with multiple amputations.
We can and perhaps should focus on the dead but it is the living that need or interest and our remembering. These veterans don’t need a moment of silence on Memorial Day or even a visit to a military cemetery and in our hearts we all know that. They need to receive their disability claims, they need to be able to see the surgeons and physicians within the VA on a regular basis. They need more than remembrance and a “Thank You for Your Service”. They need to be taken care of; they need jobs. They need to be treated with respect and they need to be treated with understanding and the likely possibility of a TBI or of PTSD if they enter the criminal justice system. For better or worse, the legacy of our latest wars in not the graveyard, but the Polytrauma Unit, the Neurosurgical Ward and the PTSD Clinic.
Read more on War on The Good Life.
Image credit: familymwr/Flickr
And while we’re at it we might want to look at the casual way in which we go to war in America. The lack of accountability by everyone involved or not involved in that “process”, and the way we justify the unconscionable.
Freedom ain’t free; it’s paid for with what can never be replaced.
This fact alone should humble us all.
“[But] from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”