A Day for Remembering

"That there are soldiers now in harm's way in places far from home." ~ Please say a prayer for military families who's loved ones are away from home & the ones who are at ahome for now.
 
Just caught the breaking news story of North Korea sucessfully launched another Nuclear Weapon. I think my heart skipped abeat, as my roomate from the Job Corps called Friday nite & said that her Army Husband is set to go to South Korea for a tour of duty... I pray that he & the others are not walking into another "conflict" that will do nothing but take lives of many on this Memorial Day. 
 
MAy the military families be pleased, may the gentleman in the military be safe & blessed & may the people of the U.S. say Thank You every chance they get to the many Vetrans that are still with us & also to those that truely deserve Flags on their Headstones not just on the reserved calendar days but everyday of the year....

Way to go, Rings!

Can I just sign on the bottom please?

thank you to the brave men and women all over the world, for keeping all americans and many others from harms way. 
 
my father served our country during wwII and the korean war as a lt. col in the 78th AAA gun battalion.  he served as the gun platoon commander.  on july 4, 1950 the battalion was alerted for movement to the far east command which meant deployment in korea.
 
the 78th AAA gun bn was active in world war II and participated in the assault and capture of attu island in the aleutians which had been captured by the japanese. for this action the battalion was awarded a bronze arrow head and one battle star.
 
for its service in the korean war the battalion was awarded nine battle stars.  the ten battles are represented by 2 silver stars.
 
the battalion crest is represented with an airplane silhouetted in a round, yellow circle.  this represents an enemy sirplane caught in the searchlights of an AAA unit.  the motto "we sweep the sky" indicates that the battalion clears the sky of enemy aircraft
 
this is just a little bitty bit of how just one childs(mine) view of our military is formed.  i'm proud my father served to protect everyone under the stars and stripes of our flag.
 
god bless america and it's people, each and everyone.
 
 
 
 

an amendment, god as he or she is known by you or not.
 
Freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, to petition, and to assemble!
 
i've accessed and expressed as a youth and occassionally in my latter years, the freedoms of.  the word 'of' is so important, it doesn't state from in any form.
 
in my teens as a university student, i protested the war....not the soldiers...i burned my bra's.....not my breast......i read freely, to agree or not....
 
i believe that's what my father, only one man among millions, had represented as his part to the freedom's 'of'. 
 
allowing freedom of a choice!  of not from.

I would like to address the North Korean situation. North Koreas first nuclear test in 2006 registered 3.6 on the Richter scale, a number that is subcritical and completely incompatible with a successful nuclear test. Because the seismographic data was inconclusive the burden of proof was on the Pyongyang government to establish its nuclear ability. In late April North Korea warned it would carry out another test in conjunction with a long range missile test. Pyongyang has used these tests as leverage to build up its perceived strength and as bargaining chips with its neighbors and the USA. In the main these programs are tools to give North Korean leaders assurances that they will not be attacked and its leaders not overthrown by external forces. Thus far, it has worked. Kim Jong Il needs to shape his country's future leadership and after his stroke in 2008, the country has become more belligerent externally and isolationist. Internally, there are competing factions that need to be balanced. And it is because of this that North Korea will be unlikely to return to the negotiating table. It will demonstrate its independence and continue to stir up the international community. The recent test registered 4.6 on the Richter scale, but the seismic data, air samples, etc. will need to be studied to gain a better insight into North Korea nuclear program. Indeed, if their test was above critical, the international community must respond with something other than rhetoric.

 All the good words have already been spoken ... In every age. In every language. 

Yet all the terrible pain, suffering, and sacrifice of our gallant men and women in the armed forces and that of their families continues unabated, and too often; taken for granted. Tears are still being shed.

How can we as benefactors of all this sacrifice even begin to adequately demonstrate our gratitude for those who have enabled our Country's dream to be born and have protected it for us everyday since?

I think it begins with the realization that the privileges we hold so dearly are also a sacred trust that has been bestowed upon us..... and then transform that realization into whatever positive actions we as individuals and/or collectively are capable.

Today is a day of remembrances and good words that express gratitude for great actions.

Peace out and be very well my friends.

the last sentence in the second paragraph should have read: Blood and tears are still being shed.

When my children were small I taught them "With privilege goes responsibility." Myriad reasons in a child's life to so instruct, from acquiring a pet on up. As does any parent, I tried, if inadequately, to expand, as they were able to understand, to the concept of country, world, universe. You do your best: I took them to everything from memorial observations to ceremonies in the court house where new Americans were given flags after their vows, becoming citizens. How much of that one never knows will stick, or even sprout from the seed, but you do your limited best.

It strikes me those words suit today as they did when I was a young mother: To what Peter Lake says, rings says, Stoney signs onto, I add my name, for no matter the 'war to end all wars,' no matter years of negotiating, renegotiating, tears and blood are yet being shed every hour, every minute -- far away, and by families here.

The more technological our ways of killing each other, the further from our target the detonator of the killing instrument, the less humane it is possible we may become. God help us if we disengage our minds, our very selves from what we as a nation are about; what countless Americans have given for us, their countrymen.

Recent years lowered us in the eyes of the world to a frightening and dangerous place; a new page now is turned, but the damage is irreparable. Unless we learn from history we are destined to repeat it, and the more blase we become, the less humane; how very thin is the veneer of civilization.

As a child I knew only April 26, Confederate Memorial Day, observed solemnly in cemeteries and at the Confederate Monument downtown bearing a statue of young -- oh, too young -- Lt. Berry Benson, a local soldier whose memoirs of that war break the heart; ring of the horror of all war. A time when people loved and respected words, and even so young, he writes as a much older man given what he and others went through. We gathered to honor the dead and then-living who'd fought; elderly men in uniform standing straight as they were able. Now, although on April 26 those dead are quietly honored, we've long broadly, seriously observed THIS day, for we are one nation, and Peter Lake well praises what we feel: "...gratitude for great actions."

Memorial Day: The one day per year where we give thanks to those who gave their lives so that we may sunburn in peace.  If that sounds flippant, it is only because of what I see as the flippant manner that so many observe the holiday.  Many will go the whole day without reflecting on what this day means. 
 
My family has never really been military.  I only know of two of my ancestors who have actively served, although two of my uncles went into the Guard to help pay for college.  My grandfather was in the Navy at the tail end of WWII.  He served as Shore Patrol on Midway island in 1945, and often joked that he was in charge of drunks and sunburns.  But he did serve, and we were all proud of him for that.
 
The only other ancestor I know of who served.  He was a Civil War infantryman from Illinois.  I have his discharge papers, and my parents have his diary.  He never wrote much about the battles.  Most of it was about the boredom of camp life, the dread of disease, and the letters he wished he was getting.  Contact from home was the best thing in his life, and that remains true to this day.
 
Strange how we honor our military by closing the post office, the lifeline for so many lonely soldiers.

HEROES.  That's what the great men and women who served, and serving in uniform are.

penn, well done!  some things can't be said enough.

Did you ever, as a kid, get into trouble so grave and scary that you didn't get hollered at? I did and that was graver and scarier still.

I was grounded in a way that even I did not want to see brought up any time soon.

So, it seemed like a reasonable thing to act as though I had just been waiting for the chance to hang around home and play with my little brother.

Eight years younger, he was a round-faced, well tempered little guy with a pretty good sense of humor and an even better sense equanimity. You would have had to work pretty hard to get his goat. Nobody did.

We were sitting on the front stoop playing a game in which BBs were rolled toward a  rain drain hole drilled in the step to fall into a mason jar below. I know, it was a little more challenging than dropping coins into one of those charity funnels at the airport but not much.

For quite awhile he amused himself watching them fall into the jar and then learned, to his amazement, that he could do it as well. That step, both warped and worn, welcomed anything towards that hole but he didn't need to know that.

"What," he asked, "Is the Morial Day?"

"Well," I explained, "for starters, it isn't that. It is MEMorial Day and Ma calls it Decoration Day. It was set up so people would remember other people who died in wars, some who didn't and just generally all the dead people you knew."

"Why," he wondered, "would somebody tell it to me wrong?"

"They didn't, that's just you and it is funny because you are a cute little guy."

"So," he asked a bit upset, "what happens if you keep saying things like that when you aren't little anymore?"

"You look like an idiot," I admitted.

"Why didn't somebody tell me?" he demanded.

"I just did. You were sitting right here, remember?"

"Are there any more things like that?"

"A few," I had to admit, "but we'll get to them when they come up."

I wish I'd been Stoney's little sister, that's what.

As always, a beautiful story well-told; moral subtle, yet so present his brother remembers it still. Stoney desn't hit you over the head; I'm sure his brother knows that, too, and is grateful.

that's 'doesn't',in the last sentence....

no: it's " 'doesnt,' in the last sentence".

New information has been released concerning the North Korean nuclear test on May 25th. Currently, estimates range from 2 to 20 kilotons. The magnitude of the blast was recorded between 4.5 and 5.3 on the Richter Scale.
The Russians and the South Koreans report that the range was in the 10 to 20 kiloton yield; this is the size of the Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki.
Although North Korea has demonstrated much, there is a great deal of difference in detonating a crude devise and actually fabricating miniaturized, ruggedized nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, it should be noted that only North Korea has tested a nuclear devise in the 21st century, and they have done it twice. Beware of the Black Swans.

georgia, were you trying for designated hitter?
 
i was born in georgia. camp stewart, then.  i have relatives traceable through the 1790 u.s. census born around 1755 from the barnwell district of south carolina. scattered there and abouts, all the way over here to arkansas, and no telling where else. (i know of a few in oklahoma, missouri, and some in illinois) my folks most likely fought each other.  that's just on my dad's side.  my mom's family doesn't keep records? hmmmm........

Stoney,

When I was young, I've mentioned it here, we didn't have television or radio, so we put on productions for our neighbors.

Once, it was a rendition of "Stop in the Neighborhood" by the Supremes.

My father said, at dress rehearsal, "I think it's Stop in the Name of Love."

Me: No. It's not.
Him: Yes. I think so.
Me: Does it really matter? Our audience is two eighty-year-old women, well renowned in the Christian Science Church.
Him: Good point.

metaphorically deep , on occasion, results in the bends.
 
happy memorial day, to all those, wherever you may be, who've had the balls to stand up and fight for what your souls believed worthy of dying for.  which ever side you stood on, surely there was another of such conviction, just different. no less, no more. no right. no wrong.  the ones stuck on the grey fence, are the universal jesters in the ever after.
 
so far.

What thought provoking gifts you all are today....... as usual.

My late father, just before he and mom died, it's been 8 years now since the accident, geeze -- but it was May, just before that Memorial Day, and I was talking to my dad on the phone.

I was talking to him about Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation.  He'd have been one of them, I thought he'd feel somehow pleased by Brokaw's efforts, somehow pleased to be so recognized for his service on the aircraft carrier in the Pacific in WWII.  Wrong on both counts: he'd long since stopped liking Tom Brokaw, and as for his service in the Navy during the war, he surprised me -- astonished me -- by telling me after a too long for comfort pause, that "P. there is nothing worth going to war for.  There are no moral wars, no justified wars, and for god's sake God won't call you to war.  There's nothing worth going to war for."  And that was the end of the subject, he said no more about it, I had no idea my conservative father felt like that -- and then he died two weeks later and took my mom with him in that car, and I will never know more about why he felt like that.  The book is closed. 

For most of my adult life I've been a reader of Thomas Wolf's Look Homeward Angel.  I was and am still to a degree, enthralled by that obtuse book, because I thought it held some Answer, but mostly because the words sang to me--and they do still.   They sing to me of family and of my father in particular. Like this: 

A stone, a leaf, a door; of a stone, a leaf, a door.  And of all the forgotten faces.

Which of us has known his brother?  Which of us has looked into his father's heart?  Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?  Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost!  Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door:  Where?  When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

                                                                  ~~Thomas Wolf

 

 

  

A while back, I had an idea for what I thought might make a good novel: an alQaeda strike takes place in Japan, and leads to rebellion within Japan to overthrow its castrating military-prohibiting MacArthur-drafted constitution. A quickly re-militarized Japan, in the context of an anxious South Korea, a North Korea that is a nuclear power hanging from Chinese marionette strings, the fact that Taiwan and China have been technically at war for over fifty years (Taiwan fires a shell across the Strait of Taiwan at China on M, W, F, and China does the opposite on T, Th, Sat----I'm not making this up, I lived there), disputed control over oil available for drilling in the South China Sea, and various unsettled disputes over island possession in east Asia, and all of it becomes a flash point.
 
North Korea is saber-rattling now to conceal the internal strife as pertains to successorship of Kim Jong Il. I don't think the older son precisely digs that the spoils (including a warehouse of Chivas Regal, and access to the lollipops-of-all-flavors prostitutes) are going to the middle son. Finding a way for North Korea to back down from this position in a face-saving way wil be very difficult, and I cannot help but wonder whether its denoument will be emerge only in the wake of a black op.
 
As regards the poll question about Memorial Day, I think its significance is set alight mostly only once a year, and thus is largely forgotten in the interstices. Georges Santayana said the history repeats itself because no one ever listens. I once attended a symposium led by the columnist George Will. I agree on little with him, but he's a good polemicist and worth listening to. He made a monumental rhetorical blow by asserting the work of the Civil War photographer Matthew Brady had the greatest anti-war effect the world has ever witnessed. He was working in a new medium, and could accurately depict dismembered bodies, dead and rotting horses, horrifying wounds, and buckets of blood. It is sad that media depiction of combat really just doesn't affect us much anymore.
 
During the weekend, I watched the film Rescue Dawn, by Werner Herzog, surely as fine a director as has ever walked the planet. It's the true story of a naturalized American soldier (born in Germany) who is captured in Laos during the Vietnam War. It vividly reminded how much I hate war, and how it would permanently alter the geography of my soul if I ever had to kill another human being, regardless of circumstances.

What a day. It started out strong, forged along nicely and has, so far, the look of ending in brilliance.

Good luck to Peterman in figuring out where to hang his laurels.

Maybe the world's problem with North Korea could be solved if Eric Clapton would just re-think his refusal to accept Kim Jong Il's invitation to perform in Pyongyang.
 
Maybe "Leila" could get Kim on his knees.

If anyone wants to take a serious look at American militarism, one couldn't do better than to read Andrew Bacevich, West Point graduate and retired colonel.  (After 23 years in the Army,  he now teaches international relations and history at Boston University.)  Bacevich has written several books, including "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War".  His words of warning are apropos on Memorial Day....... Here's an interview with Bill Moyer:   http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08152008/transcript1.html  

Kim Jong Il belongs in a white jacket that buckles in the back.  (I probably shouldn't work for the U.N...I'll keep my day job) 

My Mother's first husband was killed in action in Korea just 30 days after he and my mother were married. Her Mother's first husband was killed in 1918 in France and never knew their child , who also died that year from influenza.I pray this cycle has been broken.

thank you all.

Doc:  I'd love to read those books. Eisenhower's famous exit speech warning about the American military-industrial complex is on YouTube, but I have to say I don't precisely know how to upload that to this site. It's easily Googlable; the speech was, and remains, prophetic.

To a now-deceased grandfather, and two aging uncles, whose participation in WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam war I always viewed as somehow making homeland cirucmstances such that I didn't have to register for a military draft, I am highly grateful. I have often wondered of myself, never having been subjected to what they had to endure, never having been forged by such stress, if I am in any semblance a 'real' man in the definition they established.

I'm posting my thoughts of this Memorial Day rather late, both because I didn't want to figuratively rain on anyone's picnic and because I found this weekend to be very emotional and difficult to write about; being the daughter of a WWII veteran, the wife of a career Navy veteran, and the mom of a Marine Corps veteran.

Saturday, my family and I went to the Memorial Day Air Show at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Maryland. It was a beautiful day for an air show and many people turned out to pay tribute to the military and see some precision flying at its best. I'm happy to share my web album with anyone who might want to see a slide show of the event, featuring the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels: http://picasaweb.google.com/dvcontests/AirShowNASPatuxentRiverMDMemorialDay2009?authkey=Gv1sRgCIr9k-Lb2bH-Rw&feat=directlink

Many generations, from young to old, lined the runway to watch and listen. I remember my dad always taking me to air shows, telling stories of the past and admiring the incredible progression of flight...

Sunday, it was the Indianapolis 500. How the names still seem so familiar, even after all these years, as the sons and grandsons of past drivers now compete: Andretti, Foyt, Rahal...again many generations, young and old. Again, my father would always watch and tell me stories of past races on dirt tracks and marvel at how far auto racing had come...

Today, it was the County Courthouse for Memorial Day to honor those who have died in our nation's service. Many generations, from young to old were there, along with many veteran's both young and old. My father would always tell me stories of his WWII experience. Were my dad alive today, I wonder how far he would say we have come... 

Perhaps these thoughts really started forming when my middle son surprised me by coming home on Mother's Day. He's only 23, but already he's served 5 years in the Marine Corps, with a tour of duty in Iraq. In addition to seeing family, he came home to visit a good friend of his; a fellow Marine. This friend is now at the Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from his wounds suffered in Iraq. He has had 4 surgeries, so far. His family is in Texas and they have not yet been able to see their son since he encountered that roadside bomb. Many generations of young soldiers, fighting and dying, or living with physical and emotional scars, and I just don't see any progress being made over the years...

The reason we can all go out to the Brickyard, or to the Ballgame, this Memorial Day, is because of our veterans. Their willingness to serve and sacrifice themselves for us deserves our utmost gratitude and respect. My dad used to say that everyone who served was brave and the only reason some came back and some didn't was simply because of circumstance.

Someday I hope circumstances change and no one will ever need to die to preserve our freedoms...now that would truly be progress...