Wikipedia tells you more than 2.8 million Americans died in our country’s 82 wars, campaigns, raids and conflicts. The total includes deaths through bombings, suicides and murders.
Remember that, please, when you attend a Memorial Day ceremony next Monday, May 27, and remind yourself that the stranger next to you may have served in the armed forces or may have lost a dear one in one or another of those military actions.
We did. On Okinawa. 1945.
On the desk where I write this, there sits a small plastic case which once housed film for a camera. Inside the container are a few thousand grains of sand taken from the Omaha Beach landing site on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Above the once bloody beach is a military cemetery, with crosses and Stars of David for the 9.388 graves. More than 1,500 names of those missing in action are inscribed on stone walls at the site.
Silence reigns.
It is some 4,000 miles from the beaches of Normandy France to Park Forest, a community dubbed “the G.I. Town” for its initial mission of providing a good home for veterans returning from World War II, which will hold its annual Memorial Day program at 11 a.m. on Monday on the Village Green in its downtown area.
As part of its task of honoring those who fought in that conflict, village developers named 18 streets for Illinoisans who were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their heroism during that war. If you live on Bigelow (Elmer), Bailey (Kenneth), Cromwell (John), Gibson (Eric), Krotiak (Anton), Lester (Fred), or Wilson (Robert), your street, please remember the award was presented to that hero posthumously.
They never came home.
Beside the flags on the Village Green is a memorial plaque honoring six who did not make it back from Vietnam. It is inscribed to “the veterans of all wars of whom were asked a lot and who gave so much — we shall not forget.
“They were our neighbors.”
Today, the savagery of war is a common commodity that can be routinely seen in its explicit details on a daily basis. It was not so some 80-plus years ago when journalists like Ernie Pyle tried to tell America what global war was like. His dispatches, laced with the names and hometowns of the soldiers he wrote about, earned for him a Pulitzer Prize and affection from his countrymen.
After covering the war in Europe, he spent his final months in the Pacific, where he was killed by a sniper bullet on the small island of Ie Shima April 18,1945.
At the time of his death, he was working on a column to be published when the war in Europe was over. In it, he tried to explain to America what war was like.
Pyle wrote that with the joy of victory it is easy to forget the dead.
“Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.
“But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead man scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
“Dead men by mass production — in one country after another — month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
“Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
“Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.
“These are the things you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
“We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.”
Some years back I received a baseball cap in the mail, with Ernie’s name emblazoned on the front. I often wear it, yet no one ever asks who he was.
I know and now so do you.
We’ll see you next Monday.
Jerry Shnay, at jerryshnay@gmail.com, is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.
