Memorial Day
As we enjoy this long weekend just before launching into full summer mode, I would hope that everyone in the land of the free and the home of the brave will remember to pause a moment and say a prayer of thanks for all the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedoms we all enjoy today.
If I have learned anything for sure in this life, it is that Freedom is not Free. None of us has to travel far to find a cemetery with ample proof of soldiers who have fallen while fighting to preserve the most precious possession that any of us will ever have. Let us not forget to honor those who paid the ultimate price for us.
I will never forget Tony O'Neal who went to elementary school with me and at age eleven, played on an opposing Little League team. Every now and then I pass by the old baseball field in a neighboring community and I always glance over across the railroad tracks to see the old ball field, and see his freckled face as he is tagging me out as I slide into second base. He was going to a different school then and I think that was the last time I ever saw him.
Little could anyone have imagined on that humid Georgia summer night in 1960, that Tony had already lived over half his life at the tender age of eleven. Only nine years later, in October, 1969, he stepped on a land mine in Viet Nam, just a few days short of his 21st birthday. His final resting place is only a few minutes away from that old red clay ball field.
And then there was the courageous and selfless Milton Olive III, a youth of only eighteen from Chicago, who threw his body over a live grenade in the jungles of Viet Nam, taking the full force of the explosion to save his platoon. He was not even old enough to be called a man, not old enough to vote, not old enough to buy a beer, but he was old enough to die.
Milton Olive III
And going back a generation, there was my dear Aunt Sarah's brother, Pat Matthews, whose plane went down in WWII, and whose body was never found. His thanks is that most of us in our generation never knew he even existed.
Unfortunately these are not the only ones who paid the ultimate price and who are easily forgotten. There were many other wars and many other generations. The numbers of those in all the wars who have perished for our freedoms are endless but these numbers pale in comparison to the immeasurable hopes and dreams which perished with them. Each had a name, a face, a personality, a family who loved them and whom they loved, and a hope for a future which they were denied. Please remember them this day.
The following article reveals the origin of this special holiday.
The First Official Memorial Day
May 30, 1868
In 1868, Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued what was called General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day. He declared it to be "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land." Where do you suppose that first Memorial Day took place?
The first national celebration of Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day) took place May 30, 1868, at Arlington National Cemetery. The national observance of Memorial Day still takes place there today, with the placing of a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the decoration of each grave with a small American flag. The holiday has changed a bit since it first began, which some argue was even earlier than Logan's dedication.
Southern women decorated the graves of soldiers even before the end of the Civil War. After the war, a women's memorial association in Columbus, Mississippi, put flowers on the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers in 1866, an act of generosity that inspired the poem by Francis Miles Finch, "The Blue and the Grey," published in the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1971, federal law changed the observance of the holiday to the last Monday in May and extended it to honor all those who died in American wars.