People often confuse Memorial Day with Veteran’s Day. It’s easy for me to remember, because my youngest son’s birthday is on November 11, which is Veteran’s Day. He also served in the U.S. Army National Guard, in Kuwait and Iraq, during Operation Enduring Freedom. Timothy drove trucks for a transportation unit out of Camden, TN in support of the troops there during a nerve-racking year, between 2007 and 2008. He convoyed the roads of Iraq during the times when roadside IED’s were plentiful. He served his country as a very young man of eighteen years old, during wartime, and came home. He’s a veteran, and I’m so proud of him, but this is not his day.
Memorial Day began back in 1868 and was called Decoration Day, because people would decorate the graves of our soldiers, sailors and marines with flags and flowers to honor those who died during their service. The Civil War was still very much fresh in the minds, and lives, of the families that the war had touched. North and South gave a total of about 620,000 lives to that bloody conflict. That’s even more than we lost during World War 2 and World War 1, combined (405,399 and 116,516, respectively). Our “smaller wars” were less costly, in numbers. The American Revolution saw 25,000 deaths. You must remember that the entire population of the colonies, at that time, was only a little over two million people, so one out of a hundred people were killed. The War of 1812 (20,000), Mexican American war (13,283), and the Spanish-American War (2,446) barely combined to total the lives we lost in Korea (36,516). Vietnam (58,209) was, until recently, our longest war, but the casualties were spread out over ten years. The Gulf War in 1991 (258) was one of the least costly. It was followed by the War On Terror (7,075), which took over the mantel of longevity for our wars from Vietnam. It just ended last year, with the evacuation and fall of Afghanistan. In total, our nation has given 1,354,664 lives during wartime. This Day of Remembrance is for them. They gave all they had, or ever would have, so that we could live free. They are not just numbers, or casualties, or statistics. They are flesh and blood; sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. They all left family and friends to serve a great nation. They made the sacrifice so the generations after them would not have to. They are missed by their families. They are mourned. Their lives are honored on this Memorial Day.
On Memorial Day, in the past few years, I’ve begun to commemorate the day by putting a pair of boots (Army-desert tan) on my front steps. They sit beneath my American Flag, which flies out front. It is for all those who did not return that I do this for, and for those loved ones that never got to give them one last hug when they returned home. If one person who has lost one son, or daughter, drives by my house on Memorial Day and sees those boots-they will know who they are for. My heart is with them. My son, too, left home in the flower of his youth. He saw things he cannot forget. He lost friends. He struggles through life, even today, with the pain of some of those memories. His life was forever changed. He continues his walk, as a Veteran and a man, because of one simple thing: he came home. To those who never returned, and the families that are left behind I say simply “Thank you.”
Rolling Stones 