Dem
47
GOP
53
Reader A.G. in Scranton, PA, sent this in. As some folks may recall, A.G. is a veteran of the Marine Corps. Note that one does not say "A.G. was a Marine," as the Corps teaches that one never stops being a Marine.
In any event, we thought it was something worthy of being passed along. So, take it away, A.G. (note: PG-13 words left uncensored, for impact):
Memorial Day both is and isn't a uniquely American holiday.
It's a day set aside to honor our war dead, those buried on far-flung fields or nearer to home, in neat rows and well-manicured places, with honor.
While many countries honor their dead, most do so on important days in that nation's martial history, days of victories or of the finally coming of a long-sought-after peace.
I'm pretty certain America's day for honoring its dead is unique in that we set aside a day whose martial significance is... well, not significant at all.
What's not unique, though, in any way whatsoever, is what happened to this day we have set aside to honor veterans. We cheapened it. We monetized it. Some, of course, politicized it.
In fact, the muttered words-by-rote are heard so often and all of those jingoistic signs on businesses have become so prevalent, so common, so honestly obnoxious, so incredibly ubiquitous that the words barely even register and the signs go unseen, faded into the scenery as we drive past.
The words are almost always for the person speaking them, so everyone around them can hear how good they are to recognize veterans and to assuage whatever is sitting where the guilt that should cripple them should be, a not-at-all oddly vacant place.
"Good golly, look at her/him. They're such good people. They actually took the time to say 'thanks' to the homeless veteran they stepped over on the way into the store to buy that incredibly necessary new phone."
"Someone (else) should do something about how this country treats its veterans. They gave so much and now they're on the streets, addicted. It's shameful for (other) people to just ignore the problem."
It is. Thanks for noticing. That will mean a lot to my broken family when they get the call from the city morgue that my body was found by the tracks.
The signs are always for the purposes of showing how patriotic the owner of the car dealership is so you'll be more inclined to buy your American car from Juarez and shun that Asian bullshit built in Tennessee from the way-less-patriotic person with the smaller signs and flags down the road... who's probably some Nancy-Pelosi-lovin' homo.
"That guy at that place might not even pledge the flag with the words 'under G-d' in it every morning like I do. Why, I even heard him say 'happy holidays' to a Muslim person once, too. He hates America, he hates veterans. Oh, have I mentioned how you could have this sweet V-8 with zero down and low, low monthly payments?"
No, you haven't. I mean, yeah, thanks for the mental picture, though. That'll help keep me warm tonight. I can wrap myself in the flag to keep the wind from getting too biting and put four or five signs together to make a place to get high and die out of the way, so I'll be no bother. You're welcome for that, too. I live(d) to serve my fellow Americans.
Memorial Day's faux-patriotism isn't unique to America, though. That's a global problem. I'm willing to bet there's even some over-tariffed penguins who pretend to love their otherwise-uninhabited island in over-the-top ways. Perhaps they arrange fish into the shape of their island's flag. Perhaps they waddle around and bitch about immigrants not squawkin' good Squawkish.
"Squawk! Squawk! Cackle! Squawk!" they likely say.
Translation: "This here is mah ahland, damn it! Chilly Willy done gonna MUIGA." (Make Uninhabited Island Great Again)
"Squawk, cackle, cackle."
Yes, most penguins are dicks who love Chilly Trumpy.
I know! Right? What a bunch of assholes! And to think of all the work we've put in to warming up that cold place they have to live in. Dicks.
Before I abdicated the right to raise two incredible sons to a pretty serious heroin addiction caused by non-service-related pain and PTSD, every Memorial Day I would walk with them to the various memorials to the various war dead from the various wars that were located in Nay Aug Park, a lovely place directly adjacent to our home.
Like most memorials to the dead, to service, and to veterans they were likely introduced with tearful, somber fanfare, probably some gunshots and a rendition of "Taps," maintained for a few years, and then largely forgotten, left to the ravages of weeds, rain and wind.
To teach my sons what the sacrifices of the men and women those monuments were built for meant, we would speak of service as adults might, because my ex-wife and I always believed in treating our sons as though they were intelligent and capable of understanding complex emotions and ideas, and that was because they were.
We would pick the weeds together, polish the metal together, remove the trash, the cigarette butts, the used condoms, the spent needles, and all of the other signs of who we are and what we value as a nation together.
Across the 8 or 9 years we did that, we met one mother with a young daughter doing the same. Saw lots of people drinking and barbecuing, though. Heard obnoxiously loud music and heard the call of the dipshit, the loud, drunken yelling of a mentally deficient asswipe to his similarly mentally deficient asswipe friends three feet from him at the table.
We did see girls and, wow, my boys were the best wingmen a man could ever ask for. But that is a story about "Daddy, why did mommy have to die from cancer?" for another day.
But, I lost that right to be kind of an ass to an addiction I still have trouble understanding, that was foisted upon me by someone who lied about the drugs and murdered 10 of my 11 friends, then got a bonus for it while I met guys in prison because of that addiction who are doing life for killing one drug dealer.
That's neither here nor there, though. That's another letter.
It is in the forced abdication of my privilege of being a father where the soul of this request is to be found.
When we still honored our dead, before people stood with their heroes atop the sacred bodies of our honored dead, smiling, and gave a big thumbs up to the camera, we had well-covered columns and the perfectly aligned rows of graves marked by marble, sandstone, limestone, with names chiseled into their faces, or sometimes just a small cement slab with a metal number.
In places where the bodies were too broken to identify we give honor to a marked grave. In places where the bodies were too many or time was too precious an asset to dig them each a grave, we honor a marked grave. In places where names were unknown, the place is marked. Even in those cursed places of mass death, where the bodies of the dead remain, their graves are marked.
What we fail to honor are the millions of unmarked graves.
When I say that, I am not referring to the tens of thousands still buried in fragments beneath the old Western Front. Neither am I writing of the ten million places of battle where bodies couldn't be found or were left behind. Nor the ashes in the wind that are the spirits in the air around us of the residents of Tokyo and Dresden or the whispering echoes of those whose cautioning memories now fading around us once rose from the smokestacks above the crematoriums at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzek, Treblinka. Nor the endless, fathomless oblivions where the sea holds her dead.
We honor the places we bury the bodies that died in service to nation in the hopes that the spirit knows our sadness and our pain, our longing for them.
But, bodies aren't the only things that die in the service to nation. Because there are no bodies to bury, because these things have no mortal vessel, because you can only touch them in ways that don't require fingers, because they are paupers, because we either don't know or simply don't care, we bury them in unmarked graves.
There are a million unmarked graves of these things with names and dates that gave their lives to service to nation, but with neither spilling blood pouring from them nor wounded, bleeding hearts beating within them near to each of you reading this.
It is not only bodies that service breaks. It is not only limbs that are lost for a nation. It is not only minds that are damaged by mere moments on a soldier. It is not just flesh that bears a bullet's piercing wound on a Marine.
There are a million unmarked graves, and each of them is open, active, massive and growing each hour. They have their own species of vultures and crows circling, pecking. They have their own smell others turn away from. Like the memorials in Nay Aug Park my sons and I maintained and honored, we care for a while, then we all but a very few forget.
In the mass graves where my marriages lie, lie at least ten million more. Long months away, long hours, low pay, poor conditions, PTSD-induced mental instabilities, young bodies and desires, temptations and traumas, the conspiracy of service that filled that grave, one left unmarked and forgotten, ten million rot beneath the two I gave, a million more heaped atop it.
In the open, mass grave wherein fitfully convulses the wounded remains of my sanity, one consumed by fits of that endless nightmare of the past and too many regrets to fail to mention with no coup de grace to end it, too, lies dark histories of the supposed cowardice of shell-shocked men, of straightjackets and drugs that hurt to take in hellish, urine-soaked places—the perfectly apt symbols of the level of the nation's concern for veterans throughout the years—and of a hundred billion dreams (those numbers from this year alone) so frightening and real the sheets on beds are soaked in sweat and the shadows of the streetscape, forest, suburban night dart hither, to, and fro with malice as they lowcrawl in to kill the dreamer of the nightmare... the former person, who now has a broken mind.
My un-trackmarked arms aren't even buried, but thrown into the pile of limbs sawn off, blown off, sheared off others outside a white tent behind the lines of battle somewhere, perhaps sold to a school for study, perhaps burned to ash to ash and dust to dust.
My family, my fatherhood, lying in a lonely place, a particularly reviled one, in a dark forest in a rainy land that no one would care to visit if they marked it, atop a million million million others with ten thousand more pushed by bulldozer into that steep and wet and stinking, fly-filled place above them.
There are others, unmarked graves are all around and near to each of us. If you look closely you can see the footpaths leading to them in broken green and brown and clear glass by the railroad tracks. If you walk the nights as I do, in stillnesses the crunching sound beneath your feet another footpath, too.
If you wander alleyways which you once owned and if you know the sounds of digging hoofs and the charging bull named Fentanyl as you wave the orange, plastic cape at it and push it up your arm because you were the champion, the Matador of the underpass arena, you know the waxed-bag highway pavement you walk along, because you once were a hitchhiker-pedestrian breathing in the smell of burning, blackened, Walmart silverware, the Bodily Warming causing exhaust fumes as others either just drove by you walking between small towns in the rain or stopped, invited you to sell yourself, and you accepted, to be dry and warm, with a sweat and semen bonus.
The unmarked grave of where a high bridge, a bottle of swallowed pills, a rope, or the 1-gun salute honors the death of another veteran by suicide is one far too big and one that simply won't stop having more and more bodies heaped atop it each day. I've fallen into that unmarked grave a few times over the years, but people keep going in after me. Leave no suffering man behind to finally die and let the hurt stop, I guess.
Thanks?
The grave that is the fullest, though, the one bulging, heaving up as the sorrows and sadnesses bloat as tears keep the groundwater level high, is one of broken, lost dreams, where ten million of mine alone are rotting. I overfilled this grave myself. Every other broken woman and man of service did, too. Unburied dreams lie all around it, just decomposing where anyone could see them if they looked.
More dreams than you know have given their lives for service to our nation. Had mine not died one cold, October night in 2006, all caught behind a slamming door and a thousand lies, you'd only know of Donald Trump as the dipshit with the bad hair from New York who makes bad investment decisions and who is prejudiced against Black people.
Well... hmm... okay, yeah... well, he wouldn't be president. That would have been me in 2016, and my first term would have begun after a landslide victory of 50 united United States and it would have been the First Lady, a girl named Alexis, who would have made it all seem a cakewalk.
Everything was easy when she was there, empowering me with her blind, determined, true belief in me.
I'm a smart person, a very smart person. So smart that I knew I didn't need help for my mental health issues. So smart I knew she could deal with me being in and out of hospitals each year and the endless suicide attempts and the long absences and the cursing, and, and, and, and, and, and, and because the love was always there between us.
So smart I knew those things, so dumb I didn't know I was wrong about them.
Each day just to awaken to her was worth ten thousand dreams of other men. To have her on my arm was to dream a million more. In her lips another ten million dreams were to be found a dozen times a day, just resting there, upon the tip of her gentle, just right, small amount of touching tongue. Her hair when wet, ten million more. Her naked form a hundred billion billion. And in her touch the dreams could only count in number miles and miles, almost, almost, almost endless, in 2-point font, Helvetica.
She, once a dream, now just a dream's cold remains, lying at the bottom, ten billion more atop it for from just one day, the worst of any day with her before the last.
Unmarked graves, you might have heard of them and shook your head in disbelief. Now you know each thing of these, where they are, around you, close, and what they hold, those things of us that died for their country, and that they're real, I hope you trust me, and that they matter to those who buried pieces of us in them, because they do for me and all of us.
Of course, please honor every marked grave. Please care for them. Please respect them, do defend their sanctity and keep clean and neat their sacred soil.
Respect them, never stand atop them, only rest your bended knees upon their verdant, springtime grasses, these watered by your tears of loss. Let smiles only come from memories of the one you loved and who you lost—not from the classless, tacky, callous, money-grubbing parents and their exploitation of graves of sons and daughters for their racist politics. Let the fingers of your hand brush tears, hold others, little more.
But, please, I make this request of you, an easy one if we are honest, but one few bother with, anyway:
Listen to the gentle winds for the gentler sobs of hurting people and hear the crunching sound of broken glass and vials underfoot, keeping time and pace with you, beneath you, staying up with you. Follow those footpaths of the dreams we lost to unmarked graves filled with them, and at that waxed-bag highway ending, look at the piles of them before you, see that place it brought you, then sit with it, do honor to it, for it, please.
Respect that so many other things we had than our bodies, beings, bones died in jungles, sands, and along those endless IED-lined sniper alley streets for so many of us, and whether it's my White House with a beauty like no other, or another soldier's small house in the country with a picket fence before it and his own beauty-girl on its front porch swing, awaiting him, losing it hurt us both the same, and if you walk those broken glass, and the crunching, waxed-bag footpaths to the unmarked graves of them, sit with them and query them, examine them in detail, tell of the places that you found them, please don't forget, remember them.
They're the unmarked graves of millions.
Mark them, please. Do so simply by remembering them.
Thanks very much for this, A.G. (Z)