Our fallen and wounded soldiers!
If you get a chance … no! Make it a point to see at least some of the beautiful National Memorial Day Concert. It aired on PBS Sunday evening but you can see it in its hour and one-half entirety here. Don’t think of it as an obligation — although it most certainly is that. There should be a price we free and living should pay to those who fought and died for the blessings of liberty, however mistaken you may think the cause or misguided the tactics.
Recitations by actors of actual wartime accounts are most moving portions of the Memorial Day Concert. The Werkes has chosen one that covers both Vietnam and Iraq. It’s introduced by the honorable Gary Sinise:
When a loved one makes the ultimate sacrifice in service to our nation the grief of the gold star families runs deep. For them every day is Memorial Day. Conflicts change but the pain of casualties and death remains eternal. Vietnam War was our first televised war and our last war to use drafted forces. More than 2.7 million Americans served in-country. … Over 58,000 of our American service men and women died.
BD Wong recites the account of Hawaiian native Allen Hoe in that war and the war fought by his oldest son. It’s ten minutes, it’s real, and it’s a helluva story:
Blaska’s Bottom Line: We’re well aware that our standing photo this week shows a service man returning home, alive not KIA. I think of my own father coming home to his parents’ farm after the war, which he would one day farm himself. And I think of the relief grandma and grandpa must have had that five of their nine children served, including two daughters, and all returned.
4 responses to “Let us do remember on this Memorial Day”
“it’s real, and it’s a helluva story“
Two (2) more real helluva a stories:
STORY #1
Many years ago, Al Capone virtually owned Chicago. Capone wasn’t famous for anything heroic. He was notorious for enmeshing the Windy City in everything from bootlegged booze and prostitution to murder.
Capone had a lawyer nicknamed “Easy Eddie”. He was Capone’s lawyer for a good reason. Eddie was very good! In fact, Eddie’s skill at legal maneuvering and business management kept Big Al out of jail for a long time.
To show his appreciation, Capone paid him very well. Not only was the money big, but Eddie got special dividends as well. For instance, he and his family occupied a fenced-in mansion with live-in help and all of the conveniences of the day. The estate was so large that it filled an entire city block.
Eddie lived the high life of the Chicago Mob and gave little consideration to the atrocities that went on around him.
Eddie did have one soft spot, however. He had a son whom he loved dearly. Eddie saw to it that his young son had clothes, cars, and a good education. Nothing was withheld. Price was no object.
And, despite his involvement with organized crime, Eddie even tried to teach him right from wrong. Eddie wanted his son to be a better man than he was.
Yet, for all his wealth and influence, there were two things he couldn’t give his son: He couldn’t pass on a good name or a good example. For most of his life, that was a price he was willing to pay, but eventually federal agents started to tighten the noose around the Mob’s operations, and Easy Eddie was pressured to turn state’s evidence. He knew that the cost would be great, but he testified anyway.
Within the year, on 1939 Nov. 8, Easy Eddie’s life ended in a blaze of gunfire on a lonely Chicago street. But in his eyes, he had given his son the greatest gift he had to offer, at the greatest price he could ever pay.
Among the items the police found in his pockets was a poem clipped from a magazine. It read: “The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power to tell just when the hands will stop, at late or early hour. Now is the only time you own. Live, love, toil with a will. Place no faith in time. For the clock may soon be still.”
STORY #2
World War 2 produced many heroes. One such man was Lieutenant Commander Butch O’Hare, a fighter pilot assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Lexington in the South Pacific.
On 1943 Nov. 26 his entire squadron was sent on a mission. After he was airborne, Butch looked at his fuel gauge and realized that someone had forgotten to top off his tank. He would not have enough fuel to complete his mission and get back to his ship.
His flight leader told him to return to the carrier. Reluctantly, Butch dropped out of formation and headed back to the fleet.
As he was returning to the mother ship, he saw something that turned his blood cold: A squadron of Japanese aircraft was speeding its way toward the American fleet.
The American fighters were gone on a sortie, and the fleet was all but defenseless. He couldn’t reach his squadron and bring them back in time to save the fleet. Nor could he warn them of the approaching danger. There was only one thing to do. He must somehow divert the Japanese Zeroes from his comrades.
Laying aside all thoughts of personal safety, he dove into the formation of Japanese planes. Wing-mounted 50-caliber guns blazed as he charged in, attacking one surprised enemy plane and then another. Butch wove in and out of the now broken formation and fired at as many planes as possible until all his ammunition was finally spent.
Undaunted, he continued the assault. He dived at the planes, trying to clip a wing or tail in hopes of damaging as many enemy planes as possible, rendering them unfit to fly. Finally, the exasperated Japanese squadron took off in another direction.
Deeply relieved, Butch O’Hare and his tattered fighter limped back to the carrier. Upon arrival, he reported in and related the event surrounding his return. The film from the gun-mounted camera on his plane told the tale. It showed the extent of Butch’s daring attempt to protect his fleet. He had, in fact, destroyed five enemy aircraft. For that action Butch became the Navy’s first Ace of WW2, and the first naval aviator to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.
A year later Butch was killed in aerial combat at the age of 29.
His home town would not allow the memory of this WW2 hero to fade, and in 1949 the city renamed O’Hare Airport in tribute to the courage of this great man.
So, the next time you find yourself at O’Hare International, give some thought to visiting Butch’s memorial displaying his statue and his Medal of Honor. It’s located between Terminals 1 and 2.
WHAT DO THESE TWO STORIES HAVE TO DO WITH EACH OTHER?
Butch O’Hare was Easy Eddie’s son.
The Gotch
SHOUT OUT to Blooming Grove Cemetery for placing U.S. Flags on the plots of those who served, one of which belongs to my Dear late Disabled Navy Veteran Father!
The Gotch
Just watched. Amazing program. Thanks for the hat tip.
In 2004, David Maraniss wrote that great book about one day during the Vietnam War, They Marched Into Sunlight, which juxtaposed October 1967, when the Dow riots began here in Madison, with, in Vietnam, an American division that was ambushed and nearly destroyed by the North Vietnamese at an obscure place called on the map, Ong Thanh. PBS made it into a wonderful documentary, and because it was about Madison, the opening was here in the (horrendous) Communications Arts Building, where PBS brought the book’s American protagonists together on a panel, including in particular, it turned out for me, Lt. Clark Welsh, who led the platoon in the vortex of the ambush in Vietnam.
Welsh was from a family that for four generations volunteered to serve in the Army, which was in his blood. Yet, once over in Vietnam, amidst all of the incompetence and political corruption that infected the Army that made him physically sick, he decided the most important thing he would do was protect his boys. When Westmoreland ordered his regiment to go into combat that day in 1967 to kill Vietcong in order to raise the body count to keep LBJ and McNamara happy in the senseless war, he could see from reconnaissance that they’d be walking into a trap, and urged his ROTC Colonel, with no battle experience, to tell their command to abort the mission, but no avail.
As he anticipated, it turned out to be a trap, and, as his boys, caught between North Vietnamese and Vietcong on three sides, were being mowed down by the ambush of a much larger force, he didn’t want them to panic, which would mean a rout in which everyone would be killed, so he stood up amidst the hail of bullets, being wounded over and over again, to rally them, afraid that if he fell they would panic and be destroyed, taking nearly a dozen bullets and shrapnel, until, finally, he fell too.
Yet, at the same time as he epitomized the tradition of warrior, he saw the venality of the military system for what it was, seeking to make an island for his men to protect them off from all that was worst, and after the war was over, he traveled back to Vietnam, found Vo Minh Triet, the Vietcong general who had destroyed his troops, to talk about that day in October, and offered to help him build a school in his village and adopted several children to help them get an education.
Later in the session, he turned to Maurice Zeitlin, whom you may remember from the movie the War at Home was the sociology professor who came to the defense of the students against the cops. Welsh said he had forgiven Gen. Triet, because he was only doing what he had to do to protect his people, but he said to Zeitlin that he didn’t think he could ever forgive him. I don’t know how Zeitlin took that, but I knew how it punched me in the solar plexus.
I had been a draft dodger during Vietnam (teaching in the South Bronx slum schools where the cops wouldn’t go in was considered alternative service), and, as prime draft fodder, hated everything about the war. But, I was transformed, and when Welsh said that, I was bawling, and I’m bawling even worse now, if that’s possible, because of the guilt I felt for limiting my actions to saving my own life, but doing nothing to reach out and incur the risk of helping the others not in the middle class. Joining all the marches to end the war doesn’t really count, because we did that primarily to remove the threat from our necks, and we incurred no risks to specially get out the non-college educated youth who marched (not into sunlight) in our place.
For years after, I periodically checked the obits in Orlando, which a google search found he had retired, so I could go to his funeral to show my respect for a real hero, but, over the years, I checked less frequently, and, in the end, it wasn’t until six months too late that I saw he had died earlier in 2016.
It must have been a year or two after that when I bumped into Dave Maraniss at a party and told him how much his book had meant to me, including this coda about Welsh, and he said he wrote the book for the very reason to get both sides of those political battles to better understand the other. My god, for me, did he succeed!
Which I share here so the right can know that the left is not just the moralistic flappadoodle it seems to have morphed into these days, and so we can recognize our common humanity on this special day.