Memorial Day

Posted on | May 25, 2009 |

Today, at twelve noon, a parade will go past the end of my street, complete with the Hibernian Marching band of pipes and drums, and various convertibles with the veterans of many wars. The Pearl Harbor survivor, the oldest World War Two survivor - they’ll all be there.

I’ve been a pacifist for many years, but I’ll be there, too, and I’ll be applauding them and feeling extremely grateful for all they did - and relieved that it never became necessary for me to join up. This is, in large measure, because of what these old men and old women did (and yes, we have women veterans in our parade). They took on horrors so that we did not have to.

Of course, my life has not been untouched by all this. No one of my generation has escaped, if only because our parents were the ones who either served or suffered, and when they came to raise their families they had scars, both visible and invisible, that shaped our childhoods. Both my wife and I had fathers who were wounded, who suffered the trauma of battle and near violent death, who saw friends killed, and who, for all their brave efforts not to let it show, were certainly marked by these events. Both had forms of PTSD, almost certainly, in an age when those initials hadn’t been formed into that configuration yet.

These gentle, loving parents were the same people who couldn’t talk about things to do with the emotions, who became needlessly anxious about where their relatives were, and who, in my father’s case, would wake up in the night shouting ‘don’t shoot!’

So on this Memorial Day let us remember the dead, and the brave men and women who gave so much. And let us also remember the wider cost of the war, handed on to the next generation. If we were as a species to recall all that we might well think very differently about warfare. We might even be moved to say that the cost is simply too high. We protest about pollution and global warming and try to improve things. Perhaps we should also protest the mental damage caused by armed conflicts. We could fix that in a couple of generations. And it would be easier than tidying up the physical mess we’ve made of the earth, which will take a lot longer to sort out.

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