Memorial Day 2022

We remember them today, those young men and women who answered the call to duty and died in places most Americans had not heard of until they sacrificed their lives, sometimes by the thousands. Antietam, Bull Run, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Stone River, Belleau Wood, Soisson, Kasserine Pass, Normandy, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Inchon, Chosin Reservoir, Ia Drang Valley, Khe Sanh, Hue City, Hill 937, Kamdesh, Wanat, Fallujah, Ramadi, and hundreds of other remote outposts.

Memorial Day was created in 1868 to honor the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died in the Civil War. This post is not about the politics involved in the various conflicts or the military decisions that involved loss of life for places with no strategic value. It is about the brave Americans who were placed in harms way and fought valiantly for each other, and made the ultimate sacrifice so that others would live. God bless them all.

I leave you with this:

Battles fought and

Freedom bought with blood

Of patriots on distant shores;

Death’s knock and rattle

Claim scores

For causes known no more while

History leaves us only granite

Names absent dreams

On crosses, stars, and those known

but to God.

Wives and mothers, hearts that perish

With news that takes

Children’s fathers and abandons lovers to

Beds without slumber, only

Melancholy, grief, and the silent wail of

Memories.