I was privilged to give an address at a Memorial Day commemeration in my home town, Newberg, Oregon.  I've posted my remarks below.

Memorial Day Remarks

Chaplain (Lieutenant Colonel), US Army Reserve, Retired

Memorial Day, May 28, 2012

Fellow veterans, currently serving military members, family members, families and friends of the fallen, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen:

It’s an honor for me to be invited to address you on this day when we remember those who have given their all in the service of their country.

***

My father-in-law was a private man.  He lived in Indiana.  The closest we ever lived to him was Georgia.  During our child rearing years we lived as far away as Oregon or even Germany.  So we didn’t get to visit very often.  When we did, he would clearly be glad to see us.  Still, after greeting us and the briefest of conversations, he would retreat to his TV room.  Any of our family was welcome to watch TV with him.  It’s not like he was avoiding us; just that like lots of men, he wasn’t all that excited about conversation. 

He had a certain number of television programs he liked, among them WWF, World Wrestling Federation.  And when it came to movies, two genres were his favorites:  westerns and war movies.  When he would watch the war movies, we’re talking WWII, he would sit there and cry.  He shared only the most public of details about his life in the army during the war.  He was pretty open that he got busted a couple of times, so even though he reached the rank of SGT, he didn’t stay there.  He was a cook in the 1/1 CAV.  I always understood that the tears he shed while watching those movies were a flow of healing to his soul.

In our nostalgic way our collective memory of our country’s involvement in WWII includes our motivation for being involved in the war.  It was for the most noble of purposes:    To save the world from the horrors of totalitarian regimes and to defend our "freedom", "prosperity," and “our way of life.”  And yet in living rooms all across the country for more than 65 years, veterans, like my father-in-law, cried when they saw images of the war.  Who could they talk with?  For whatever reason, they confided the details of their memories only to other veterans.

***

I have learned then that there are different levels of perceived safety when it comes to sharing the stories of war.  The entry level is to be a vet.  Combat vets, airborne and Special Forces vets have a perceived higher level of trust.

***

Roderick drove a supply truck in Vietnam.  I met him only about two years after he returned home from South Vietnam.  I was teaching at Eugene Bible College.  Roderick was one of my students.  At that time he ragged on me because I had been deferred from Vietnam.  We developed a good student-teacher friendship.  We were close in age and our families were at close to the same life stage.  Sometimes after class we would be having a normal conversation.  By normal I mean conversational friendly tones.  An expression of terror would sometimes come over his face and he would lash out in harsh tones.  The whole emotional valence of the conversation would change dramatically without warning.  At the time I didn’t understand what that was.  I don’t think he did either.  It was more than twenty years later that he entered therapy in the VA system, was diagnosed with PTSD, and later put on full disability.  Like so many other veterans he lived all those years, and for that matter, continues to live, with a deep scar on his soul.

The pain for veterans of Vietnam is intensified because when they came home from the theater of combat, the nation rejected, rebuffed, and even blamed them for the war, verbally deriding them and even spiting on them.  Addiction rates, suicide rates, homelessness, and  post traumatic stress syndrome are all high for Vietnam veterans.

For ten years I served as a part time chaplain in a Veterans Administration Medical Center.  My time with the VA made me acutely aware that our veterans have paid a huge price to serve our country.  In the VA hospital, the obvious price is manifest in maimed bodies, psychological and emotional trauma, the struggle to recover from addictions of various sorts, the pain of emotions that refuse to quiet down.  Not so obvious is the awareness of combat veterans that they lost something that they have never been able to recover.  These loses go unnamed and unrecognized.  It is as if something in the vet has died.

***

Even though I was deferred as a college and graduate student from serving in Vietnam, Vietnam is my war.  It is the war that changed my consciousness and I believe the consciousness of the nation.  Vietnam is a cultural watershed.  Where pre-Vietnam veterans, especially those of WWII era, approach this day with patriotic awe and reverence, I’m shaped by my post Vietnam DNA.   Vietnam sowed seeds distrust and cynicism that have produced bumper crops in our population and continue to bear fruit.   This eroding of confidence is only one of the many costs of war Veterans and our nation bear.

In the years since World War II our military has been deployed for numerous interventions.  We honor our veterans from Korea who often suffer because their sacrifices have gone unacknowledged.  They often wonder where they fit in being overshadowed by World War and Vietnam veterans.   Veterans from the first gulf war have fears of the mysterious “Gulf war Syndrome.”   The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing larger numbers of casualty survivors than we have experienced in other conflicts.  Our technology and delivery of medical care has improved.  While we are thankful that more wounded personnel survive, that survival rate has overwhelmed the VA health care system. 

My last assignment was in Japan.  There I met a young specialist who had been assigned to us after completing a tour in the current combat zone.  In his year of deployment, he saw four of his friends die violent deaths.  One of them literally died in his arms.  This still teenaged solider, like so many of the current soldiers, is suffering now, and in all likelihood will suffer for the rest of his life, with the indelible impressions seared in his memory. 

Some of our veterans from the current conflict are coming home with a new kind of injury, traumatic brain injuries, which are the result of explosions that literally crash the brain into the skull, leaving the brain with a serious injury akin to a concussion. 

I want to acknowledge one more category of veterans and military personnel who have been and continue to be deployed in clandestine operations that are unknown to the public.  For a time I lived at Ft. Meade, the home of the National Security Agency.  Some of my neighbors told me that they carried their own military records just in case they were ever captured or killed in one of their deployments.  That way the government could maintain deniability.  They would claim no knowledge of them. 

Those military personnel who are involved in these secret missions are not authorized to wear combat patches and they are not awarded metals of honor.  One of my friends told me that he couldn’t get the army to acknowledge some of the years he carried his own records.  Still, these brave men and women put their lives at risk.  We want to honor them today, even though they cannot stand up and tell us who they are.

***

Memorial Day has been set aside as a day to remember those who have given their lives for the sake of our national interests.  I’ve expanded my thinking to include those veterans who have sacrificed a part of their lives, their physical or psychic bodies, and to include their families who offer their support.  Today we have military personnel in more than 130 countries around the world. 

My entire military career was in the Army Chaplaincy.  My involvement in the military brought me into close contact with our brave and noble soldiers.  In isolated places around the globe and in the combat zone, politico-ethical questions faded into the back ground.  The concerns of the soldier, even in those faraway and dangerous places, were events at home, tragedy and illness, relationship breakups and deaths, missing the significant life steps of children, spouses, families and friends—births, first steps, school days, sports triumphs and defeats, graduations, birthdays, holidays. 

Our veterans, and current serving military personnel, have paid and continue to pay a significant price.  This price knows no national boundaries.  Veterans of every nation who put their lives at risk often lose their lives or lose part of their bodies or souls.  Suffering knows no national boundaries.

We gather today to pay tribute to those who laid down their lives and to say thank you for those who have sacrificed so much.

I long for a world at peace where we don’t subject our young people to the scars of war.  While we await such a day, I pray for our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coast guardsmen and offer a blessing to all who work to meet the needs of veterans.