There's a War Memorial in the middle of my town.
It's a park, actually. It's filled with dozens of memorials, each one for a different conflict. Apparently, it's the only park in Maryland that commemorates soldiers from every American war; from the French and Indian War, all the way to the first Gulf War. There's even a monument dedicated to the residents of Frederick County that lost their lives fighting the Barbary Pirates.
Apparently, there are also some soldiers buried under that park. Which I guess is fitting, considering its purpose.
I first discovered the park a few years ago, on another Walpurgisnacht, while drifting through town in the middle of the night, in my usual state of psychedelic illumination. It was knowledge of the bodies buried there that actually drew me to investigate it; tickling my sense of ghoulish voyeurism. But I ended up having an entirely different experience.
I imagine most people have been to war memorials at one time or another. Living in the D.C. area, it's an especially common occurrence; I'd lost track of the number of memorials I'd been to before I'd even made it to high school. After a while, they just start to blend into one another, and it's easy to become desensitized to their meaning. But, usually, those are memorials dedicated to one, single, specific war or conflict. I found that the effect of a memorial dedicated to All American War to be powerful in the extreme, even to someone as jaded as I sometimes pretend to be.
The first effect I noticed is that there are simply so many monuments in this park. And when you realize that each one is dedicated to a different war, then you begin to get a sense of the scope of just how much of our history we have spent trying to kill other people before they could kill us. And you can't help but start to ask yourself, Have we ever been at peace? Is peace even a realistic possibility? Or is it just an idealistic fantasy we tell ourselves to soothe our sense of fear and alienation in the face of a violent, hostile, uncaring world; just like "God" and "Heaven"? (How ironic that those two concepts in particular, so often the direct cause of so many wars, are actually responsible for all wars, in a way. Would it be so easy for us to kill one another so often, and in such numbers, and for such ridiculous reasons, if so many of us didn't believe with such absolute certainty that they wouldn't really be ending forever, but simply traveling to "a better place?" I would wager that Life means more to the atheist, who understands its true finality.)
But then I began to wander through the monuments, one-by-one, down through the history of our wars. The Persian Gulf War. The Vietnam War. The Korean War. Each one filled with names chisled in stone. Names of people who lived here, in my town. Who wandered these same streets at some point in their youth. Some who even wandered the same school hallways. Maybe some who had even lived on my street. Fools and Heroes, every one. Strong, and Doomed, and so unbelievably Brave. Braver than I will ever be. Braver than I ever could be. And just boys! Just boys. They'd only just started. They had so much left to do. Just boys. How is it possible that this country, of all countries, that coddles and insulates and over-protects its children to such a ridiculous, obsessive degree, could do all of this? Could still be doing all of this? It is literally, staggering.
And so many names. So many names. The World War II memorial is the largest in the park, by far. A wall, ten feet high, and fifty feet long. Entirely filled with names. Our names. And I wandered down that memorial, reading those names, trying to take it all in. It was almost too much. I could barely comprehend so many people, just from my tiny little town alone(!), all fighting and dying all over the world, not much more than sixty years ago. How could that possibly have happened?! And this, the most moral and just of all the wars! The one where we were most clearly combating an Evil; the greatest Evil the modern world had ever seen. It was still almost too much to believe. But I finally got to the end of that immense list, and the end of that long wall... and then I realized - the list of names had stopped at "L." Oh, no, I thought, it's not possible. But I rounded the corner of that wall to discover, to my horror, that the entire other side was filled in, as well.
It felt like a lead weight had been inserted into my chest. It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking down into tears right then and there. I simply could not comprehend that amount of pain and suffering, on that enormous scale.
But the memorial that affected me most, and that I will always remember, was the memorial to the soldier boys of World War I.
I've always had a bit of a fascination with WWI. It was, by far, the most gruesome and horrible conflict that humanity has ever seen. The brutal combination of trench warfare and the advent of modern weaponry - the machine gun, the tank, the flamethrower, the grenade, the fighter plane, chemical warfare, etc., etc. - created an environment that was, quite simply, more akin to a meat grinder than what we think of as "war." Almost forty MILLION people killed, wounded, or missing-in-action. By the end of the war, Europe was running out of fighting age men. So they were drafting men as old as seventy, and boys as young as fourteen. More meat for the grinder.
At the time, they called it "The Great War."
The memorial dedicated to this human atrocity is obviously the oldest in the park. It's almost certainly the first one built there. It was sculpted in the style of classic monuments, with a bronze statue of a doughboy standing atop a large, octagonal concrete base. Onto each of the eight sides of the base has been affixed a bronze plaque, each about three feet wide by four feet tall; and each plaque is, again, a list of names. The names are so small that they are impossible to read without climbing up onto the memorial itself. They had to make them that small in order to fit them all on the monument. And unlike the other monuments in the park, which list the names of everyone involved in their conflict in any way, the WWI memorial is from an earlier time in America's history - it only lists the names of the boys who never came home. Boys from my hometown. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. All slaughtered. Gone now, even from memory. All that's left of them are names on a plaque, that you can't even read.
As I wandered around the memorial, trying to comprehend the weight of it all, I came upon one plaque that was different from the others. It had fewer names, and was in a larger font. I noticed it had a title across the top that was large enough that I could it read it:
"The Negro Men of Frederick County, Who Gave Their Lives In The Great War of 1917"
I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes, trying to come up with my response to that; to sum up how it made me feel then, or how I feel about it now. I'm sorry, but I can't. I just don't have the words. I guess I should try to concentrate on feeling grateful that they were even included in the memorial at all.
I'll leave you with this thought for this Memorial Day. Sums up my feelings pretty well.
I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. And while you're out there, barbequing, and sunbathing, and partying - try to be good to someone. Just because you can.
And just because, it's something.
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