Memorial Day in the Heartland

As a kid, our Memorial Day weekends started in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Saturday evenings, after Dad got done at work. We were already at Grandma’s up on Koenig Street, there to help her clip dozens and dozens of flowers from her vast, well-tended flower beds, arrange them in coffee cans saved for just this purpose through the year, and placed in water in huge, old copper boilers. She always seemed to know just which arrangements should be put together and exactly how. Dozens of big, beautiful and fragrant peonies, rose, iris, and mums, interspersed with long ferns. The very smell of peonies today will take me back into those days more surely than any time machine could ever do.  We did the work in the backyard, carefully clipping the flowers at her direction, or that of our Aunt Violet, returning them to Grandma, who directed the arranging under the porch light.  Then we loaded up two cars for transport to Atkinson, Nebraska, the ancestral Fleming home, to decorate the graves of family members going back to the times of the Civil War. We would make the drive early the next day, stopping at the cafe in O'Neill for breakfast, and then staying with old family friends in the Atkinson area Sunday night. The Millers, Roots, the Arnholts from Bassett, Nebraska, and others. On Memorial Day, we arrived at the cemetery early and Grandma would arm each of us with a long bladed knife for use to attack the dandelions and cactus that would proliferate in the sandy soils of North-Central Nebraska. Fleming kids learned not to run with sharp objects from about age 3, and you had to do your part in the family tradition. Each grave would be carefully tended, the flowers arranged, and as other families did similar work, the cemetery soon became a joyful riot of color, and rich floral displays. People would come by for hugs, handshakes, and to exclaim about how big the children had grown, to ruffle our hair and plant kisses on our bashful cheeks. I remember how proud I was when the men started shaking hands with me, and I remember how big, firm, and powerful those men's hands were, and how the ladies all smelled of scented powders and perfumes.

Then, at Noon, the Color Guard marched solemnly in, formed up, presented the colors, and fired a thunderous salute with their '03 Springfields and then retired from the field. I counted my emergence into manhood from the day when the penetrating crack of those seven heavy caliber rifles no longer made me jump involuntarily. My Dad would then be gone for a while, always coming back very quiet and somber, his eyes wet with tears. It was well for you as a small child not to misbehave during those times. It was only years later that I began to understand. WWII had not been gentle with Atkinson. A lot of her sons and fathers had died in combat with the 134th Infantry in Europe, and my father had grown up with, played ball with, or worked with them all. For many, he had been there when they died, not gloriously or poetically, but violently, covered in blood, and screaming in fear and pain. Men would come by to pay their respects to my father. He was a local hero, having earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for gallantry in action. But, perhaps in their eyes more importantly, he was one of the few that returned to Atkinson, alive. Shot up though he was, badly wounded in action some two weeks after surviving the living hell that was the Battle for St. Lo in France, July 14-18, 1944. In the two days of bloody fighting for the little town of Emilie, and to take Hill 122, the 134th Nebraska Infantry suffered 35% casualties with 102 men killed, 589 men wounded, and 102 men missing, either captured by the Germans, or their bodies simply obliterated by powerful blasts from tank and artillery shells, with nothing left to recover.  It was while he was gone from our family plot that he went to visit the graves of friends, lost during that battle and others.

All combat veterans silently suffer from tremendous guilt for having lived while so many others have died. In the abstract, to those of us who have not suffered through the brutal hell of armed combat, it may seem unnecessary. But when the dead are those you knew, that you grew up with, trained with, got drunk with, told outrageous storeis and lies with, and fought beside, sometimes with guns and grenades, and sometimes with knives and fists, and even teeth, it is a far different experience. It haunted my father the rest of his life, as it haunts other, younger veterans today.  The grand tools of war become more sophisticated.  The reality of war, the very personal, awful sounds and sights, when armies close upon one another, and the ammunition runs dry, and men are left with the pure animal instinct to kill, simply to survive, that reality has not changed in thousands of years.

Memorial Day is a great day for parades, a great day for music and barbeques and family. It is also a great day to say Thank You to veterans for their service, and their sacrifice. It is also, perhaps, a very good day to hold them gently, and say earnestly, "I know that I cannot know it, or feel it as you do, but I am sorry for your pain."