Memorial Day

Flags, parades and speeches celebrate those who fought and died for their country, but what they did--and still do--is better commemorated by silent grieving over them than with bombast and color.

In "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway had his World War I soldier saying:

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations...and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity...Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

Today is a day for honoring the fallen but disowning not glorifying what the worst in human nature made them endure.

Obama Says Uncle

On Memorial Day, Barack Obama told a group of veterans, “My grandfather marched in Patton’s army, but I cannot know what it is to walk into battle like so many of you."

He went on to talk about an uncle, "part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz" and, returning from the war, spent six months in an attic: “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

Since then, the GOP gaffe police have been gleefully pointing out it was the Russians who freed Auschwitz and that Obama's mother was an only child, causing his campaign to scramble and admit that he should have said "great uncle" and "Buchenwald."

Sloppy as he may been with the words, Obama had the music right, as a Patton army contemporary of his ancestors can attest.

In the spring of 1945, we were sweeping through Germany and Austria. Along the way, we saw stragglers in ragged stripes, dazed gaunt figures wandering the roads and being picked up by Army trucks. We didn't know the names of the places they had come from, but we knew who they were, and the sight of them was an indelible reminder of why we had been fighting.

Most of us didn't spend any time in attics after coming home, but our lives were changed forever by having seen what human savagery can do.

Obama was trying to evoke and honor that pain. What he said might not win any prizes on a quiz show, but it was true to the spirit of Memorial Day and human decency.

A Man Called "Sweet Pea"

This Memorial Day, as they have for the past five years, residents of Skowhegan, Maine will be thinking about Jay Aubin, one of the first among 4081-and-counting American troops to die in Iraq.

What the numbers conceal is the continuing grief of countless families, friends and neighbors in every corner of the country who live with the loss of young men and women like Aubin, who was 36 when he died on March 20, 2003, leaving behind a wife, two young children and memories of a good life.

On a wall at Margaret Chase Smith School in Skowhegan are pictures of him from the time he was a middle-schooler who wanted to be a pilot to photos of a Marine officer with his flight helmet next to a helicopter with markings on the side: Capt. "Sweet Pea" Aubin, so named for his upbeat attitude.

A teacher there has used him as a model to show students they can achieve whatever they want and still be kind to people. "If you can be 'Sweet Pea' and be a macho Marine pilot, you can be 'Sweet Pea' on the playground, 'Sweet Pea' in the cafeteria," he explains. "There's no reason not to be nice no matter who you are or who you want to be."

Apparently he never changed. As a Marine, Aubin, who didn't drink, would check a bus out of the motor pool and park in front of the dance hall after a ball to provide rides for those who drank too much.

"If the helicopter goes down and anyone is killed, I want to go, too," he once told his mother.

Aubin died in a crash during a dust storm near the Kuwait border in the first days of the war.

This weekend, as politicians make speeches and veterans march and flags fly, the people who knew him will be thinking of a man called "Sweet Pea," as countless others will be remembering young men and women like him. No words or symbols will take away the pain of losing them.

To Make Memorial Day Memorable

In 1969, over Memorial Day, Life Magazine devoted an issue to pictures of 242 American soldiers who had died in Vietnam in a recent week. While the nation, the editors said, was being "numbed" by a "statistic which is translated to direct anguish in hundreds of homes all over the country, we must pause to look into the faces. More than we must know how many, we must know who."

It made the country stop and think. This Memorial Day, the best way to honor the dead of all America's wars would be to look at those who died in Iraq and see them as people, not statistics.

On a cable news network or PBS, at the rate of one every ten seconds, it would take more than 11 hours to bring their faces, names and home towns to the TV screens of American homes.

Doing so would not be a political statement, but a reminder as concrete as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington of the human meaning of the words "sacrifice" and "honor."

Deep in the bowels of the New York Times' web site, the faces are now there in a composite for those who want to seek them out, but they deserve to be seen everywhere, however fleetingly, to bring the war home on Memorial Day.

Amid the usual speeches, parades and flag-waving, it would make the holiday truly meaningful this year.