Remembering nation's vets, even as Memorial Day's importance seems to fade

By John Farmer/The Star-Ledger

Another Memorial Day. It always brings back memories, distant ones of days long gone, of parades and bemedaled men, many marching in uniform, neighbors who’d been through the fire.

The Memorial Day parades after World War II (Decoration Day then) were celebrations of more than victory. They celebrated the fulfillment of the implicit promise of the nation’s founders that their infant democracy would not merely lead the world but, in time, save it. As it surely did in World War II.

Everybody had a part, not just those who fought. So did the women who nursed the wounded and those at home who worked in the factories that became arsenals of democracy. (Remember "Rosie the Riveter"?)

Even men who weren’t called served. They registered for the military draft and took their chances like everyone else. Some were eager to serve but couldn’t because of medical problems or because they held civilian jobs vital to the war effort.

Memorial Day, in short, held a special meaning for almost every American family back then. For me, it’s a memory ever green.

But you don’t see much of that anymore. Our country doesn’t require that sort of service now or see it as an obligation or even a measure of citizenship. And that’s regrettable.

None of this is meant to belittle our volunteer force. It’s the best-trained, most professional military we’ve ever put in the field, a special bunch. Rarely have so few Americans borne so much of the nation’s military burden.

But the result is a growing distance between those who serve in harm’s way, or risk it, and the rest of us. In the process, a steady erosion in the reverence once accorded Memorial Day has occurred.

Actually, the original Memorial Day observance has long since disappeared. In the beginning, it was a one-day national tribute every May 30, an outgrowth of observances in the North and the South to memorialize the roughly 700,000 who died in the slaughter of the Civil War.

An act of Congress in 1968 standardizing federal holidays decreed that Memorial Day be held the last Monday in May as part of a three-day weekend holiday, which, as time passed, became a made-to-order signal for a pre-summer shopping spree.

I’ve nothing against shopping. But using a memorial tribute to those who lost their lives in our wars as another occasion to make a buck profanes the day and defiles the tribute.

The disconnect between the average American and those who served actually began with the Korean War. It wasn’t even labeled a war, merely a "police action." But — though one of our shortest conflicts, only three years — it was one of our bloodiest, with an annual death rate double that in Vietnam, 12,000 a year vs. 5,000-plus.

Nobody really much noticed. The men didn’t cheer and the boys didn’t shout and the ladies and girls didn’t all turn out (as the old song has it) when Johnny came marching home from Korea. But at least Korean vets, unlike those returning from Vietnam, didn’t face insults from war protesters at home or the treacherous humiliation delivered by Jane Fonda in Hanoi.

Vietnam ended the military draft, and in the years since then, Memorial Day observations have occupied a smaller place on the roster of patriotic remembrances.

For George Daher, a friend who saw some of the worst of Vietnam and has the Purple Hearts to show for it, Memorial Day is less important than a date in mid-May when 16 Marine buddies died in a fierce firefight in 1968, one of the bloodiest years in that war. "That’s the day I remember," he told me.

Membership in veterans groups, the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, has declined in recent years, too, partly because World War II, Vietnam and Korea survivors are dying off faster now, but also because fewer returning veterans bother to join. I’m guilty in that regard. Never was a joiner.

We’re unlikely ever again to see Memorial Day observances like those of the past. But there is a way we can pay private homage: the "National Moment of Remembrance."

Wherever you are tomorrow, no matter what you’re doing, at exactly 3 p.m. take a moment to remember those who gave what Lincoln at Gettysburg called "the last full measure of devotion."

It’s a little thing, but altogether fitting.