By John Burtis
Monday, May 28, 2007
It is Memorial Day in America, a day when we remember all those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom, and a day when we marvel at their courage.
Many of my thoughts on this hallowed day return to my father's mother, who always described our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines as "our boys." And when we'd watch TV together, my brother and I would hear her remark, "Look, those are our boys."
My grandmother always referred to our flag as "Old Glory." "Kids," she'd explain to my kid brother and me when the American flag would pass us by on one of the parades, "There goes Old Glory. Remember to put your little hand over your heart." We always did.
Our boys have done so many valorous things across our history. They saved our thirteen states and ended the Civil War, they taught the mighty German army, Imperial and Nazi, a lesson twice, and they rescued our prisoners of war, who faced certain death, miraculously from the hellish conditions found in Cabanatuan.
Our boys left bloody footprints in the snow when they surprised the Hessians at Trenton, just as they slogged through the sooty cloying mixture of volcanic sand and blood on Iwo Jima, that next to the last exit on the road to Tokyo.
Along the way, from 1776 to today, our boys provided care to our enemies on and off the battlefield. They rescued downed Japanese pilots and drifting Japanese seamen. And they carried critically wounded German soldiers to England on the same landing craft which brought the Americans, the British and Canadians, and the Free French to Normandy on that June day.
My old man always put out the flag out from his second floor bedroom in the white colonial home of my youth. And when our country's flag wasn't flying in our hometown's breezes, it rested, covered, in the darkness of the old man's closet, free from dust and sunlight, where it shared space with his naval uniforms, until it was called upon to serve again.
My father's mother always put the Gold Star which stood for her brother-in-law, my great uncle, my old man's father's brother, who served in WW I with the 42nd Rainbow Division, in our front window on Memorial Day. And this sacred right continued until she passed away.
My great-uncle Earl, the last of our family to die in battle, served with the artillery, which was still horse drawn at the time of World War I. He was trained to put the gas mask on the horses in his battery before he donned his own. And this act of compassion and military necessity cost him his life, thanks to the invisible vaporous horrors found at the front in that distant France of so long ago.
There is a faded picture of Corporal Earl Burtis somewhere in my photo collection. It shows a smiling but tired young man in his military uniform, in his fore and aft cap, with his ribbons on his chest. It is the only evidence I have of a man who went down with Phosgene gas before he could pull his own gas mask on. But every one of his horses had those goggle-eyed contraptions on when he fell, the letter said. He died so that his horses might live, one small act of personal courage from a forgotten American soldier in a war seemingly lost in the mists of eternal time. I have his medals and that small red outlined white bar with the single red star above the small pair of black crossed cannons, which his mother always wore and which were passed to me on that Memorial Day after my grandmother died. And I used to visit his final resting place on every Memorial Day of my youth in Spring Forest Cemetery in Binghamton, which lay on a small rise above a towed 75mm cannon, just like the ones he used to serve.
Everything comes in waves and troughs and patriotism is no different. It waxes and wanes with the news from the fighting front, as a result of a war's coverage in the press, and it bottoms out when our craven politicians lose their nerve, forget their men in the field, and grasp at any convenient floating straw.
Today our leading politicians are selling our boys out at home while they maneuver to cut their legs off in the field. While this is nothing new, it still saddens me.
We are fighting another twilight war, where those who kill us lurk in the shadows, hide behind the bodies of the innocent, yet have their malevolent manifestos published by our leading publishers and broadcast on our network news shows – acts which are specifically designed by those liberal cabals to horrify and frighten us and turn our desires and designs for victory into the humiliating cries for surrender.
Our boys are in danger overseas today and they need our whole hearted support to eke out a win over the cruel minions of religious fascism, who hope to destroy our way of life, abolish our freedoms, and behead the non-believers. And our refusal to support them in their mission amounts to a cowardice which we cannot attribute to them.
Out there, in France, Germany, Italy, on Okinawa and Guadalcanal and points in between, at Antietam and Valley Forge, at Chosin and in the Central Highlands, in the Punch Bowl and Arlington, and at the bottom of the seven seas, are those little plots of hallowed ground that will forever be America.
Though we have departed those fields and oceans, we did so in victory and our blood and the valor of our soldiers remain. Let us always do so.
It is Memorial Day, 2007, and it, like every other one I can remember, belongs to Uncle Earl.
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