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Post by rgs318 on May 23, 2023 9:06:24 GMT -5
On our church bulletin board I saw today a quote that for me sums up what we honor on Monday...
"WE DON'T KNOW THEM ALL, BUT WE OWE THEM ALL"
May the souls of all who sacrificed their lives for us and our country rest in peace.
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Post by sader1970 on May 23, 2023 9:10:42 GMT -5
AMEN!
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Post by rgs318 on May 27, 2023 11:24:10 GMT -5
Here is a quote that, I believe, has special meaning on this Memorial Day (taken from the readings that are part of the Patriotic Rosary):
"No one can rejoice more than I do at every step the people of this country take to preserve the Union, establish good order and government, and to render the nation happy at home and respectable abroad. No country upon earth has ever had it more in its power to attain these plessings than United America. Wonderously strange. than, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means, and to depart from the road toi which Providence has pointed us, ao plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass. The Great Governor of the Universe has led us too far and too long on the road to happiness and glory, to forsake us in the midst of it. By folly and improper conduct, proceeding from a variety of causes, we may now and then get bewildered; but I hope and trust that there is good sense and virtue left to recover the right path before we shall be entirely lost". George Washjington, June 29, 1788
May we honor the sacrtifice of all those being remembered on this Memorial Day by remembering the thoughts of the great man himself and acting as he instructed.
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Post by newfieguy74 on May 27, 2023 13:05:34 GMT -5
My sister came up with a good way to honor Memorial Day. She is one of many volunteers who today are placing individual flags on the 77,000 graves at the National Cemetery in Bourne (my father, a Captain in the Coast Guard, and my mother are buried there).
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Post by mm67 on May 27, 2023 14:23:23 GMT -5
Memorial Day: In memory of all those who paid the ultimate price and gave their lives for our country: DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY.
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Post by efg72 on May 27, 2023 18:33:50 GMT -5
Fifty years ago this weekend I was part of the Army honor detail celebrating Memorial Day at Arlington Cemetery. I was an MP assigned to the Old Guard. Naturally, a special honor and gift to pay tribute to the heroes that served this country, but also the old guard who are remarkable men and women. I was part of it again in 1974, and like MM67says Duty, Honor, Country.
I pray we can regain those special values for our country and we never forget those that served before us, and those that follow to hold this great country together.
Wishing all a special Memorial Day weekend
For Memorial Day
In Flanders Fields BY JOHN MCCRAE
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
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Post by efg72 on May 27, 2023 18:34:01 GMT -5
All of the men and women who served and gave their life for our country lived by the CODE Duty, Honor, Country
General Douglas MacArthur speech to the cadets
General Westmoreland, General Groves, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps,
As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, "Where are you bound for, General?" and when I replied, "West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place: have you ever been there before?" [Laughter] No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well. It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code — the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent.
That is the animation of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal, arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always.
"Duty, Honor, Country" — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.
The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.
They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease.
They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?
Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.
His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast.
But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism.
He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.
In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people. From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage.
As I listened to those songs, in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle-deep through the mire of shell-pocked roads, to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death.
They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory.
Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as we sought the way and the light and the truth.º
And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those broiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation of those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropical disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.
Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory — always victory, always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of Duty, Honor, Country.
The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral law and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promoted for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong.
The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training: sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death, he disposes those divine attributes which his Maker gave when he created man in His own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However hard the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.
You now face a new world, a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite spheres and missiles mark a beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution.
We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining the ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of spaceships to the Moon of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.
And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who are trained to fight. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.
Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war guardians, as its lifeguards from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiators in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice. Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government: whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing indulged in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as firm and complete as they should be; these great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.
You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds.
The Long Gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.
This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished — tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.
In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.
Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.
I bid you farewell.
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Post by efg72 on May 27, 2023 18:46:28 GMT -5
Introduction
Celebrated on the last Monday in May, Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer. Families fire up the grill or flock to the lake house, while those who remain in town are able to take advantage of the weekend’s sales. But Memorial Day is also the day we set aside to honor those who died in service to their country. It is more than a day of remembrance, for it is also a day for “us the living” to re-dedicate ourselves to civic renewal and to perpetuate our form of government.
Death in the Civil War
Memorial Day grew out of the grief and tragedy wrought by the Civil War, and to appreciate the day—and continue its traditions—one must first understand the context from which it arose.
On April 9, 1865, at the McLean House in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the armies of the United States. Though it took another few months for the remaining Confederate armies to follow Lee’s example and for hostilities to end, Lee’s surrender signaled the close to the bloodiest four years in US history.
By the end of the Civil War, some 750,000 Americans in the North and South—more than two percent of the population—had been killed. In 2013 numbers, such a percentage would exact a death toll of more than 6.3 million Americans. As historian Drew Gilpin Faust notes in her vivid portrayal of death and the Civil War, This Republic of Suffering, during the war “loss became commonplace; death’s threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war’s experiences.” She continues:
[F]or those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death. . . . As they faced horrors that forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to retain their most cherished beliefs, to make them work in the dramatically altered world that war had introduced. Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives—and deaths—at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture. The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.
Dying away from home was an especially distressing prospect for Civil War Americans. The last words of the dying were given an especial significance by these Victorian Christians, for they represented the state of the soon-to-be-departed’s eternal soul. Parents and siblings who were given news of their loved one’s injuries rushed to the battlefield hospital to care for their dying beloved and to witness his final moments. More often, news came too late—if it came at all—and so others tried to record the last breaths of their dying comrades—or, in some cases, of their enemy. Hospital workers and other civilians likewise tried to bridge the divide between battlefield and home, writing letters to next-of-kin, encouraging soldiers to write their families, and filling in for absent mothers and sisters. Many did so with the hope that their own soldiers might be receiving the same care elsewhere should they need it. One popular wartime song described the gratitude those at home had for such nurses and caregivers:
Bless the lips that kissed our darling, As he lay on his death-bed, Far from home and ’mid cold strangers Blessings rest upon your head. . . .
O my darling! O our dead one! Though you died far, far away, You had two kind lips to kiss you, As upon your bier you lay.
Being buried away from home was a constant worry for the soldiers themselves. Letters from the period are filled with soldiers’ wishes to be buried in their family plots, and some dying soldiers used their last written words to describe where they had fallen so their families could come and retrieve their bodies. “Death is near,” wrote 26-year-old James Montgomery in a blood-stained letter to his father in Mississippi, “I will die far from home. . . . I would like to rest in the graveyard with my dear mother and brothers.” His sentiment was a common one.
When a family came looking for their deceased, their search—even if they knew generally where to look—often ended in anguish. (The Montgomery family, despite their efforts, never found James’ grave.) Due to the incredible scale of carnage, the bodies of most dead soldiers were, of necessity, treated impersonally. Though an officer could expect that his body would be sent home to his family, the remains of the enlisted were treated with less care. Burial was haphazard, frequently en masse—especially if the graves were for the enemy dead—and it was not uncommon for shallowly-dug burial grounds to give up their dead when a change of the weather demanded them.
A Civil War Holiday
Given the broad reach of death, soon after the Civil War ended grassroots efforts to honor the dead arose. Citizens first sought to identify and properly bury the fallen soldiers. Clara Barton, a Civil War nurse and founder of the American Red Cross, established the Missing Soldiers Office to help families find information about their missing loved ones. Edmund Burke Whitman, a quartermaster during the war, became the superintendent of America’s new national cemeteries—established by Congress in 1867—and led expeditions to the war-torn South to find the buried Union dead; with the aid of black troops and former slaves, he located more than 100,000 graves. By 1870, the nation had re-interred some 300,000 Union soldiers in the new federal cemeteries. Roughly 120,000 of them remained unidentified.
In April 1865—the month that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated—blacks in Charleston, South Carolina performed their own re-burial service. Four long years after the war had begun there, the city lay in ruins. Most of the city’s white population had deserted the city and so were not around to see the 21st US Colored Infantry Regiment march into Charleston that spring. The regiment was instead greeted by the thousands of former slaves who still lived there.
During the final years of the war, Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison, and at least 250 Union soldiers succumbed to exposure and disease there. Now, a small group of black workmen re-buried the Union dead who had been buried in a mass grave behind the track’s grandstand and built a whitewashed fence around the new cemetery, naming it “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
On May 1, 10,000 Charlestonians—many of them former slaves—paraded around the slaveholders’ race course, with the procession led by 3,000 black children carrying flowers and singing “John Brown’s Body.” Historian David W. Blight describes what came next:
The children were followed by three hundred black women representing the Patriotic Association, a group organized to distribute clothing and other goods among the freed people. The women carried baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses to the burial ground. The Mutual Aid Society, a benevolent association of black men, next marched in cadence around the track and into the cemetery, followed by large crowds of white and black citizens. . . . [T]hey declared the meaning of the war in the most public way possible—by their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of roses, lilacs, and marching feet on the old Planters’ Race Course. One can only guess at which passages of scripture were read at the graveside on this first Memorial Day. But among the burial rites the spirit of Leviticus was surely there: “For it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you . . . in the year of this jubilee ye shall return every man unto his possession.”
After the dedication of the cemetery, the crowds retired to hear speeches, enjoy picnics, and watch parading Union soldiers—much like a modern-day Memorial Day.
Other cities—approximately 25—also claim to be the progenitor of Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day.1 In March 1866, for example, nearly a year after the parade in Charleston, the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia set aside April 26 as a day to “wreath the graves of our martyred dead with flowers”—and encouraged women elsewhere to do the same. In many Southern states, April 26 is still celebrated as Confederate Memorial Day. In 1966, Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to settle the question by declaring Waterloo, New York as the birthplace of Memorial Day, for it was there that, on May 5, 1866, businesses closed and residents flew flags at half-staff in commemoration of the Civil War dead.1
But Decoration Day did not take on a widespread prominence and become a shared day of celebration until May 1868. John A. Logan, a retired general in the US Army and commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of Union Civil War veterans, set aside May 30 of that year “for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating, the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, hamlet, and churchyard in the land.”
Logan’s orders were heeded, and three years after the Civil War ended a crowd of 5,000 gathered at Arlington National Cemetery. At the ceremony, Congressman and future president James A. Garfield spoke, and veterans and orphaned children decorated the graves of their fallen comrades, countrymen, and family members. Similar ceremonies were held that day at 183 cemeteries across 27 states. The following year, 336 cities in 31 states—including in the South—observed the call to remembrance.
Memorial Day: Beyond the Civil War
In 1873, New York became the first state to institutionalize the observance of Decoration Day on May 30. By 1890, all the Northern states had done so. As the meaning of the day shifted from celebrating the cause of the Union to a more general commemoration of the Civil War and its dead, Southern states also made Decoration Day their own. Over time, too, the name of the holiday shifted from Decoration Day to Memorial Day, perhaps to encompass the feeling that memorializing entails an act even greater than simply decorating or caring for the resting place of the fallen. “Memorial Day,” Blight writes, “provided a means to achieve both spiritual recovery and historical understanding. . . . [It] became a legitimizing ritual of the new American nationalism forged out of the war.”
With over 116,000 Americans killed in World War I, Memorial Day broadened its scope even further in order to honor all of America’s war dead. As in other allied countries, Americans began using the poppy as a flower of remembrance, and the sale of poppies was used to provide aid to children orphaned by the war. (The popularity of the poppy comes from John McCrae’s 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields,” in which the Canadian soldier paints a haunting picture of the flowers growing amid the graves of World War I.)
After World War II—in which another 405,000 American lives were lost—Memorial Day also became a day to pray for peace, and since 1950 every president has included such a plea in his Memorial Day remarks. Since the year 2000, each president has also asked Americans to pause at 3 p.m. local time for a moment of silent reflection.
One hundred years after John Logan issued his order for the first national Decoration Day, in 1968, Congress finally declared Memorial Day a national holiday.2 In so doing, however, Congress moved the celebration from May 30 to the last Monday in May, as part of the Uniform Holiday Bill that created the three-day weekend, in part, “to stimulate greater industrial and commercial production.” As with the other holidays affected—Washington’s Birthday, Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Veterans Day—the change has been met with some resistance, and many veterans’ groups advocated for returning the day’s observance to May 30.
Despite the distractions, despite the long weekends and barbecues and beginning-of-summer festivities, many Americans still memorialize the nation’s dead each May. About 5,000 people gather each year at Arlington National Cemetery, where the president or the vice president of the United States places a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.”) Members of the Army’s Third US Infantry (“The Old Guard”) place miniature American flags in front of more than 260,000 gravestones at the national cemetery. Communities across the nation hold similar ceremonies, decorating graves, attending parades, giving speeches, remembering the dead, and enjoying food and one another—just as the first American celebrators of Memorial Day did 150 years ago.
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Post by Crucis#1 on May 29, 2023 14:01:35 GMT -5
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