Folks, it is that time of the year in which we set aside some time to pay our respects and remember those who gave their lives for the rest of us. Over the years, there have been more than 1,200,000 people who have made the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.
Add to that number family, friends and members of their combat teams and the number of citizens who have felt this pain is multiplied many times over.
Memorial Day to begin with was called Decoration Day. It is a day when we all have something in common.
It is a day when we set aside political, religious, geographic, race and class differences to honor one of the few things that we all have in common. The sad part of this is that as the years pass, the day is observed by fewer and fewer Americans.
Last year, I was honored to ride in two parades and speak at each of the two services. There were maybe 50 people at each service and half of them attended both services. It would seem that we are becoming more and more removed or disconnected from who it was that gave and protected our freedom.
We have two wars we are currently involved with. But we seem not to be paying much attention to them. We are losing combatants regularly; but when we look at the number of families who have been touched by these military actions, not every family is sharing in the loss of a loved one as it has been in the past.
There is no real sacrifice felt by most families. So, our current wars are thought about in the abstract, as if they are not real. There are some other things that make these military actions unique. For example, we have, as a percentage, many more wounded returning home. Much of this can be attributed to better care of the wounded right on the battlefield.
In the past, many soldiers died before they could be helped. And, just as we as a nation have forgotten the meaning of Memorial Day, so have we forgotten, or chose not to think about, the wounded.
There are also many more mentally wounded returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In past wars, accept for a few skirmishes, the enemy was not all around us. They were in front and their position was known. In fact, the position of the combatants was called the front.
We send young people – and I say “people” because more than 230,000 women have served in our two current wars – into combat and expect them to come home the same as they were before they left. But they have had experiences that none of us can possibly understand.
The reason I bring this up in a column on honoring our combat losses is because we are experiencing more losses from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute stress disorder (ASD) than we are in combat. In wars of the past, we label these problems battle fatigue.
The deaths caused by PTSD and ASD are actually much higher than our current combat deaths. These are losses by suicide.
For active duty soldiers, there are about three suicide deaths per week. But that is not the big problem.
After our troops come home is when things really take a turn for the worse.
Research that was done for the year 2005 shows there are approximately 120 veterans committing suicide each week.
These are vets from all past and current wars combined. This is a subject that we don’t like to talk about or even think about for that matter. But it must be considered when we look at the total cost of lives from war.
There is a small park in West Virginia that I like to visit every so often. It is snuggled in at a base of a mountain and has small log cabins that were built during the Great Depression by the government. The mountain is fairly large. There is a combat vet who lives on this mountain.
This man saw a lot of combat and one evening he told me he “didn’t come down off the mountain and the sheriff did not come up on the mountain.” He didn’t volunteer any more information and I thought it best not to ask.
I have been asking my students this past week what Memorial Day is all about. Some of the older students understand, but only one of the young students understood the true meaning.We are not doing a good job of informing our youth.
Not one student knew that at 3 p.m. on Memorial Day, local time, everyone is asked to take a moment to remember.
Folks, let’s take some time this weekend to honor those who gave us their lives; but let’s also remember those who came home – and their families.
Bill Horne is a professor at Southern State Community College and a columnist for The Highland County Press.
