This Memorial Day, I have many thoughts wandering around in my head. The hope that I will soon be able to safely visit the Georgia National Cemetery in Canton, Georgia, and hear the new carillon play. That makes me think of my first visit to Arlington and the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for me an experience that left me speechless then and still does, my ears ringing with the profundity of the silence. It reminds me of the late Judge Sam Lowe, who spent 11 months in a POW camp in Germany.
It also brings to my mind two other men—my great-uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Weyman Major, and my now late friend, Captain Robert “Punchy” Powell, who devoted the last years of his life to ensuring that the 352nd Fighter Group, which escorted bombers from England to Germany, and its remarkable men would be remembered.
I can go straight in my mind to Uncle Weyman’s funeral in 1967. It was the first time I saw a 21-gun salute and heard Taps played in person by a lone bugler. When he knew he was going to die, he asked to come home and be buried in a small cemetery in Cordele, Georgia, a momentous event for our small rural town. Three months before he was due for promotion to full colonel, Uncle Weyman, my grandmother’s youngest brother, died of leukemia at age 48, evacuated from his last post in Anchorage, Alaska.
Uncle Weyman enlisted in World War II and served under Gen. Mark Clark in north Africa and Italy. (Gen. Clark would later become the commandant of The Citadel in Charleston.) Uncle Weyman remained in the Army, rising as a non-commissioned officer to serve in a variety of places across the U.S. and around the world, including a mission in Korea in 1961, when the Cold War was full on and our involvement in Vietnam was first beginning. I have no evidence to support the idea, but I’ve wondered if his blood disease, unseen in anyone in my grandmother’s family before or since, was connected to one of his apparent specialties—biochemical warfare. Just a theory—we’ll likely never know.
I was only 10 when Uncle Weyman died, but from that moment, I would hold every lost soldier in my heart, according each the same sense of somberness and honor of the sacrifice—whether I agreed or not with the agenda of those who sent him or her into harm’s way.
I never got to talk with Uncle Weyman as an adult about his knowledge of things we will likely never know or his opinions of the judgment of his superiors. But, I was privileged, while working with Punchy Powell to publish a book of stories and interviews from the 352nd, film a video tour of the museum he once kept in his basement, and provide technical support for him when his sight failed him, to talk with him about a wide variety of things. I proudly drove him, along with one of his 352nd compatriots, Don Bryan, to and from the airport in Atlanta when they made their last visit to Bodney, England, the site of their airfield they flew from in 1943-44. Bless you, my beloved West “by Gawd” Virginian.
When I first met Punchy, I was a younger woman in my 40s, politically independent, but leaning left (still am). At the time, Punchy was in his mid-80s, and a registered Republican. He was an Eisenhower Republican—of no relation to the ilk of the Republican Party today. Punchy and I debated any number of issues during the hours we sat beside each other at his computer. I learned much about things I had not been taught in history class and I think he learned that the world looked somewhat different to me, a member of the generation of his children.
But one thing was the same—we both held each other in great respect. I dare say that Punchy came to love me. I certainly loved him.
Unfortunately, these men are not all I mourn today. I mourn that the very ideals they fought for are disintegrating in front of my eyes, that some large contingent of Americans—large enough to continue to defend a president who doesn’t have a clue to what respect and humility and sacrifice even mean—apparently can’t or won’t read the Bill of Rights for themselves and have the perverted sense that what all these men fought and died for was the “right” for them to have anything they want, irrespective of whether their desires impede other equally valuable, equally important citizens from getting what they need or want for themselves.
Nor do they apparently “get” the concept that if as a citizen something is their right, it is also the right of every other citizen, even those—especially those—who speak with an accent different from their own, subscribe to a different set of man-made interpretations of what “God said” or “God thinks,” have darker (or lighter) skin, or have a different set of reproductive organs—despite the fact that our brains and hearts aren’t found in our vocal chords, skin, or genitals. (Thank God that I figured that last one out early on—I had a hysterectomy in 2001 and if I’d depended on one of them to help me make the decision, I might have feared I would be undergoing an elective lobotomy.)
I can assure you that Punchy and Uncle Weyman and all of the men and women who have fought and died in dangerous parts all over the world didn’t fight so you could buy an AR-15 and parade it through a restaurant with no regard for others there. They didn’t fight and die so you could refuse to wear a mask during the epidemic of a virus for which there is neither a cure nor a vaccine. They didn’t fight and die so you could demand that Target or Walmart or Lowe’s be opened (with your AR-15 along) so you can buy a new grill to flip your hamburgers on today.
Yes, they did fight for a country whose highest ideal is freedom of personal choice, but with that freedom has always come responsibility to others. Most of them never dreamed they were dying so we could make choices with no regard at all for the impact those decisions would make on others—especially those who have no choice or ability to get out of our arrogant way. The Declaration of Independence ends with the statement, “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” What else, pray tell, does that mean? We mutually pledge the risk of our lives, our money, and our dignity as human beings to each other. It’s mutual—you don’t get to demand my pledge to protect your rights without making the same pledge to me and vice versa.
So, today, I mourn not only for those brave humans now gone, but for the loss of the America they fought and died for. I am hopeful that those who share with me the drive to create new alternatives for living in peace and safety and liberty together will link arms together this fall and remove those from power who couldn’t give a damn about anything except themselves, many of whom I suspect would find it difficult to prove they even took a course, much less learned anything about civics or accounting or economics or administration. And leadership? Please.
But today, I am less hopeful than in years past. I am no longer as assured as I once was that we as a people are capable of achieving that outcome, because it requires a commitment to an American ideal that I have discovered even some I once knew apparently, to my despair, don’t and perhaps never shared—that when compared to the lives and safety of those around us, an annoying inconvenience is a small price to pay.
Otherwise, we spit on the graves of those who paid the ultimate price.
Prodigal Prophet 