It’s funny, what you remember about your mama. Mine’s been dead for 54 years. She died when I was on my way to Vietnam. I remember her telling me “Goodbye.” She called me her “prodigal son” after I went to sea when I was 17, but nobody killed a fatted calf or put a ring on my finger when I finally made it home.
But at least I got back. Next Monday, 29 May, is Memorial Day when our nation will honor the many servicemen and women who were not so lucky and died in the service of our country. I have seen their graves in cemeteries all over the world (France, Belgium, the Punchbowl in Hawaii, etc.). One of my favorite poems, “The Soldier” (1915), by Rupert Brooke, and which I have recited publicly at several formal mess night celebrations, eloquently sums up the haunting sadness I have felt when I visited the gravesites of our heroes who are buried so far from home. It speaks of England, but it applies to the universal, worldwide soldier:
If I should die, think this of me:
that there’s some corner of a foreign
field
that is forever England. There shall be
in that rich earth a richer dust
concealed,
A dust whom England bore, shaped,
made aware,
gave, once, her flowers to love, her
ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English
air,
washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
Many people confuse Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. Veteran’s Day is the day set aside to thank and honor all those, living and dead, who served honorably in the military, in war or in peace. Originally called Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War I at the 11th hour, on the 11th day, on the 11th month of 1918, it was officially renamed “Veteran’s Day” after the Korean War and set aside to honor veterans of all American wars, living and dead.
Memorial Day, on the other hand, was first officially observed in 1868 when flowers were placed on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers at what became Arlington National Cemetery, once the home of General Robert E. Lee. Since 1970 it has been celebrated on the last Monday in May. It was originally known as “Decoration Day,” and is now a day for remembering and honoring military personnel who died in the service of their country, particularly those who died in battle or as a result of wounds sustained in battle.
Another wild card in the military service honors day trilogy is Armed Forces Day which is celebrated annually on the third Saturday of May. It is dedicated to the 1.4 million personnel who are currently serving on active duty in all branches of the U.S. armed forces. All these holidays are important, but it is easy to get them confused.
I generally stay confused. Much of life, it strikes me, is different than we suppose it to be. I spent most of my naval career trying to sort out fact from fiction, to separate myth from reality. I’m certainly not the first nor the last. In a chapter of his autobiographical novel, “Life on the Mississippi” (1883), Mark Twain (Samuel Clements) talks about reality versus the myth of the mighty Mississippi River. When he was merely a passenger on a steamboat, he saw only “the beautiful sunsets; a solitary log floating in the water; rippling water surrounding a dead tree which stood like a sentinel.” When he became a captain, guiding a steamboat up and down the river, his perspective changed: “The sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow; that floating log means the river is rising; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights; and that dead tree, now gone, was a landmark for navigation. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river.” Clements saw things as they really were.
We should see Memorial Day for what it really is. Thinking back over my long life, I’ve had experiences on Memorial Day that both undermined and supported the official narrative of the holiday. For example, on one such day long ago, the ship I served in returned to the States after having been assigned as the flagship of the United States Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean for three years. Our ultimate destination was the Brooklyn, New York, Navy Yard, where we were scheduled for a major overhaul, but we first had to stop at Naval Weapons Station, Yorktown, Virginia, to unload our ammunition. I was an enlisted man then, and I was on watch high on the bridge as we pulled alongside the pier which gave me a great view of everything that was going on down below. Since I had been out of the country for so long, I remember being totally fascinated by the up-to-date American automobiles parked on the pier – particularly a brand new 1963 Chevrolet Impala coupe. For three years, I had seen nothing but Renaults, Fiats, and Citroens, so it was wonderful to see some new “American iron” for a change.
On another Memorial Day, much later in my naval career, after I had become a chaplain and while I was assigned to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, I was on the program for a big ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. I was the junior of six chaplains at Annapolis, only a lieutenant commander, and the only evangelical protestant on the staff. The chapel at the Academy is the size of a cathedral, and one of the founders of the U.S. Navy, John Paul Jones, is buried in the basement. The liturgy and order of service used in the chapel is decidedly high church Anglican; consequently, the theology of the naval officer corps, consisting of many Naval Academy graduates, always struck me as leaning toward the Church of England. In fact, when I was at the Academy, Sunday chapel attendance was compulsory and copies of the Book of Common Prayer, 1895 edition, were in every pew.
As the junior chaplain, I caught all of such “extra” duties on holidays, because that’s how things work in the Navy. As the only non-liturgical protestant, I also had to conduct more than my share of funerals and weddings. For example, in June of 1974, I performed 31 midshipman weddings in the chapel. In those days, the midshipmen were only allowed to go home for a few days each year, and there was a pent-up demand to get married immediately upon graduation. I worried about the future of such weddings, because there was little or no opportunity for pre-marital counseling, and some were marrying individuals they hardly knew, but we all tried our best. There was also a huge naval officer retirement community living around Annapolis, and many of them wanted to have their funeral in the Academy chapel. Until very recently, I could still quote the funeral/burial/committal service in the Book of Common Prayer from memory. I also had more than my share of funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. Although I didn’t think much of his humor, one of the Catholic priests at the Academy liked to say: “Benny has had so many funerals at Arlington we should call him the ‘Virginia Planter.’”
Before long, I was back at sea on another Memorial Day and my ship was a few days out of Guam when we found ourselves in the same latitude and longitude where the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was torpedoed in the final days of World War II. The Indianapolis was the sister ship to the one that I spent three years on in the Mediterranean and has been in the news a good deal lately, including books and a Hollywood movie. It was enroute to the Philippines after having delivered the first atom bomb, euphemistically named “Little Boy,” to the B-29 airfield on Tinian Atoll, when it was sunk in 12 minutes by an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine. Of the approximately 1200 crewmembers onboard, 900 survived the sinking only to face exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, and shark attacks. When the survivors were finally rescued four days later, only 317 sailors remained alive, making the incident the worst at sea disaster in U.S. naval history.
The Old Man, having a sense of the day and of history, decided that he wanted to have a brief ceremony and lay a wreath in the water. As the ship’s chaplain, both tasks fell in my purview. The “ceremony” was no problem, but the wreath was another matter. Where do you get flowers when you are 500 miles from the nearest land? I had a wreath a few weeks before when we left San Diego, but we dropped it, as is tradition, when we passed “Battleship Row,” entering Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Luckily, I had a clerk, a young man from San Benito, Texas (same hometown as the famous Texmex singer, Freddy Fender), who was both smart and creative. Quick as a flash, he constructed an award-winning wreath out of wire, half a bed sheet, and several colors of spray paint. That ship didn’t have a brass band, like we did on the battleship that I was later on, but I managed to get the ship’s rock and roll band to play a pretty good rendition of the “Navy Hymn,” so we didn’t have to sing a cappella:
Eternal father, strong to save,
Whose arm does bind the restless wave,
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.
On my first Mediterranean cruise, a grizzled, World War II-era chief petty officer gave me some profound advice. He said, “‘Reb,’ remember these four things and you will be a success in life: “a sailor’s hat will always blow off in the wind; ‘then’ will always catch up to ‘now;’ women rule the world; and things change.” Although the first axiom was too existential for my 17-year-old mind, I knew intuitively that he was right about the rest. The chief was mean as a snake, but he was a philosopher and my “sea daddy” as the expression goes. He looked out for me. And he taught me to see both the opportunity and the irony in everyday life. For example, a sailor was once asked, “What’s the biggest problem in the Navy, ignorance or apathy?” The sailor replied, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Unfortunately, as more than a casual observer of the human condition over the years, in some temporarily nasty and uncomfortable places like Cuba, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Lebanon, the Philippines, Iraq, etc., I’ve found that attitude is not uncommon.
For Peggy Lee, a famous “torch singer” of the 1940s and 1950s, her signature song, “Is That All There Is?”, full of angst and ennui, summed up all her disappointments in life. When she was a little girl, she so looked forward to going to the circus, but once she attended, her response was, “Is that all there is?” As a teenager, she looked forward to being on her own, but when that time came, her feeling was, “Is that all there is?” As a young adult, she couldn’t wait to get married, but again, her response was, “Is that all there is?” And so went all the important milestones of her life. If we are not careful, important events like Memorial Day can become meaningless blips on the calendar whose true significance becomes lost in the fog of nostalgia and a similar refrain of “Is that all there is?” This coming Monday, my friends, should be seen for what it is: a day set aside to honor those in the military who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. “This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”
Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
