Memorial Day

From Wikipedia on the origins of our Memorial Day:

In Charleston, South Carolina in 1865, freed enslaved Africans celebrated at the Washington Race Course, the site used as a temporary Confederate prison camp for captured Union soldiers in 1865, as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who died there.

Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, freedmen exhumed the bodies from the mass grave and reinterred them in individual graves. They built a fence around the graveyard with an entry arch and declared it a Union graveyard.

On May 1, 1865, a crowd of up to ten thousand, mainly black residents, including 2800 children, proceeded to the location for events that included sermons, singing, and a picnic on the grounds, thereby creating the first Decoration Day-type celebration.

The preferred name for the holiday gradually changed from "Decoration Day" to "Memorial Day", which was first used in 1882. It did not become more common until after World War II and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967.

On June 28, 1968, the Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which moved three holidays from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend. The holidays included Memorial Day. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971.

From my own experience over time:

I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. After being drafted, I applied for that status, which was denied but granted on appeal when I wrote I would go to prison before fighting. I could have checked the box declaring I was homosexual; but I didn't believe gay people should be excluded from service. During that period I didn't wave the flag. I marched, protested and thought I was part of a movement changing the world for the better. I listened to Bob Dylan, not Kate Smith. I was angry, idealistic, naive and young; though I still believe it was a mistake to get involved in Vietnam.

9/11 changed me. I pasted an American flag bumper sticker onto my sun porch window facing out for the world to see and asked myself whether I could fight and kill in war again. By then gay veterans groups were active across the country; openly gay men and women were accepted into service in many other countries. It was just a matter of time before "don't ask; don't tell" became history.

Today thinking about Memorial Day, I find it sad that in my own neighborhood there is a memorial to the war dead that has been forgotten and neglected and thought fondly about Walt Whitman:

But O heart! heart! heart!

 O the bleeding drops of red,

  Where on the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead

Inside an anthology of gay and lesbian poetry, I found World War II by Edward Field who flew missions over Germany as a navigator and described his plane going down in the North Sea returning from a mission, which I just represent partially here in a narrative form:

...we stood on the wing watching the two rafts being swept off by waves in different directions. We had to swim for it...It was midwinter and the waves were mountains and the water ice cold. You could live in it twenty-five minutes the Ditching Survival Manual said. Since most of the crew were squeezed on my raft I had to stay in the water hanging on...When I figured the twenty-five minutes were about up and I was getting numb, I said I couldn't hold on anymore...one of the gunners got into the icy water in my place, and I got on the raft in his...That boy who took my place in the water who died instead of me I don't remember his name even...As evening fell the waves calmed down and we spotted a boat, far off, and signaled with a flare gun, hoping it was English not German. The only two who cried on being found were me and a boy from Boston, a gunner. The rest of the crew kept straight faces...This was a minor accident of war: Two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea and we were back at Grafton-Underwood, our base, ready for combat again, the dead crewmen replaced by living ones, and went on hauling bombs over the continent of Europe, destroying the Germans and their cities.

Thank you Edward Field and Walk Whitman for your service and for writing about it.