To be honest, I'm not convinced there's anything I can say about it that could convey my personal appreciation for all those people who've laid down their lives to preserve the US. Can't beat Lincoln on this:
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.... (Gettysburg Address)
Almost anything you can say about Memorial Day comes off totally self-serving; "thanks" just doesn't cover what they did for me.
About 10 years ago I followed the path of Sherman's March through Georgia doing research for my Civil War novel. In most cases, you almost have to see the ground of a battlefield to write about it well, even if you're just writing fiction. Standing where those men stood, seeing what they could see can give you an entirely different perspective on things. Same is true of Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Manassas, Fredericksburg....
Anyway, leaving Atlanta (which is completely rebuilt and doing fine now) I veered off Sherman's course and headed down toward Americus, Ga., to Andersonville. That was one of the worst prisoner-of-war camps in the US during the Civil War. Yeah-yeah, Elmira.... OK, that was no picnic, either. Don't want to get into a yours-was-worse contest here. Andersonville is a national park now and a memorial to all POWs from all wars in which the US participated.
The old camp itself, the area that had been enclosed by the stockade walls, is a pretty good size and parts of it are dotted with capped wells. These are just metal caps embedded in the ground, maybe the size of the top of a mayonnaise jar. There wasn't a lot of good water at Andersonville, so the prisoners dug those wells, except Providence Well, which is kind of in the middle of the camp. A bolt of lightning struck the earth there and a well sprang up all by itself. Still and all, it's surrounded by signs warning against drinking that water.
Otherwise, a Y-shaped stream runs through the stockade, the branches on the hillsides feeding what's now a creek no more than two feet wide, if that. This ends in an area that's deliberately kept marshy. This served as a latrine mainly, but sometimes the water was used for drinking or washing, too. Sometimes a weakened prisoner just couldn't get to fresher parts of the creek. It was marshy because the fence impeded its flow beyond the wall of the stockade.
I visited Andersonville in late October, and it was 90 degrees that day. According to some reports from POWs at Andersonville, the death rate was highest in August, due to the heat. The day before I'd been to Pickett's Mill northwest of Atlanta, and the ranger there warned me that Andersonville was below the "gnat line," so to expect plenty of bugs, and he was right.
The prisoners at Andersonville had no shelter, no shade. Only the water described. The place was only open for about 10 months, and in that time, I believe something like 30,000 POWS moved through -- and quite a few of them are buried there. Something like 20% of them died of scurvy, typhoid, typhus, starvation, untended wounds, in some cases the violence they perpetrated on each other, and heaven only knows what else. It's one of the saddest places I've ever seen.
The museum is small but offers a tour of a wide variety of horrors soldiers have suffered throughout the centuries when they fell into the hands of their enemies. They had a life-size bamboo cage modeled after those that the North Vietnamese used to parade US POW's through the public streets with citizens throwing garbage and other stuff at them.
They also have a display of things the POWs made while they were in captivity. Little metal boxes of woven metal, these made from food cans cut into strips. One item that caught my eye was a handmade US flag about the size of a man's handkerchief. There's a story behind it.
This was at a Japanese POW camp during WWII. One of the Americans incarcerated there made the flag out of some kind of sacking, using an ink pen for the blue field of stars. I'm not sure where he got the red dye for the stripes, but the flag is a pretty good replica of the "real thing." During one inspection, a Japanese guard found the flag and confiscated it from the prisoner.
At this camp, the POWs were tasked with cleaning out the offices of the Japanese commanders. A prisoner who was assigned to this duty found this handmade flag in the trash in one of the offices. He retrieved it and returned it to the man who'd made it, probably at some deadly risk to his own well-being. Now it's just a relic from the past. And maybe a very painful memory for someone, at that.
Part of the Andersonville complex includes the graveyard for those who died there. When the Civil War ended, Clara Barton went down to Georgia to assist in collecting the names of those who'd died at Andersonville in order to erect tombstones for them. Actually, at the time they died, their bodies were just dumped into a common grave behind the tents that served as the prison hospital. So the tombstones now stand there side-by-side with only inches separating them and only minimal length between the rows. The tombstones don't represent individual graves; they only acknowledge those who are buried there... somewhere.
Then there's Arlington National Cemetary across the Potomac from Washington. That was a Custis family plantation -- as in Martha Custis Washington -- and ended up belonging to the wife and family of Robert E. Lee. During the Civil War, the land was "appropriated" shall we say, by a Union quartermaster named Meigs, who turned the land into a cemetary for the Union dead.
Meigs' son had been killed in battle, and Meigs wanted to bury him in the kitchen garden at Arlington, so that his grave would be visible from the windows of the plantation house. Sure enough, the oldest graves at Arlington are in the kitchen garden right outside the house.
And Audie Murphy is buried under a big tree directly across the road from the amphitheater behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. You can stand facing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the view encompasses the Potomac River, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Capitol Building, all in one line.
The last time I was at Arlington there was a sad little funeral in progress: a horse-drawn caisson with a single coffin on it under a flag, followed by a couple mourners. They were moving down a hillside on a side lane. I didn't know anyone still observed those traditions.
Anyway, everytime I see the flag, it conjures up all of this stuff. What does it say about the US now that we're so willing to give up our freedom for specious promises of subsistance from Barack Obama and Tim Geithner? Is that why all of those soldiers suffered and died? So I can stand in line at a filthy public clinic and beg for free aspirin or one more week on the dole? Or pedal to work in a piece of junk fueled by rotten cabbage so Waxman and Pelosi can keep their seats in the House?
Just can't find the honor in that.
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