If this looks familiar, it should. Parts are from last year.

It is worth noting that Obama visited Hiroshima, Japan and made noises that only slightly avoided an apology for the atomic bomb which, along with one six days later at Nagasaki, gave Japan the excuse needed to surrender.

Dad was in the WW II US NAVY. By that stage of the war he was in the Pacific, the coxswain of a landing craft. You remember the landing craft in the openings of war movies – they’re targets. That would have been Dad. When peace broke out, Dad was two months from participating in Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu. US Sixth Army could be expected to suffer between 514,072 casualties including 134,556 dead and missing. The army’s figured admit that they do not take into account the Navy’s losses.

What am I saying here? Simple. Had we not nuked Japan, had the war proceeded to the invasion, I and millions of other Americans would have never been born. The same goes, of course, for millions of Japanese and others. Thank God for the Bomb.

Instead, Dad ended his Pacific experience by being a water taxi, his landing craft providing liaison to the Allied fleet anchored in Tokyo Bay.

And I’m here.

Used to be easy to find a soldier.  In 1968, when I joined the Army, the Viet Nam War was in full swing. the draft was in effect.  Everybody had a brother or a son or an uncle in the military in some capacity.  On the streets the military haircut was easy to spot among the herds of hippies and fields of fops sporting long hair.

Even more, everybody had dads, uncles, grandparents who’d served in WW II and Korea. I had a great-uncle who was a veteran of WW I. My maternal grandmother was a welder at a shipyard. It was rare to see a politician at the national level who didn’t have some military experience.

I don’t know how to put it.  I remember the winter of 1969, the final weeks of a course at Fort Knox’s Armor School that turned young soldiers into tank commanders.  The days were filled with classes, marching to and fro, learning mapreading and small unit tactics and gunnery and communications and dozens of other things.  The evenings, for many, were filled with study in order to pass the course.  I needed no study, graduated #2 in a class of sixty.  My evenings were filled with reading and listening to a million conversations.

Friends. These were friends, all young males between eighteen and maybe twenty-three.

We had a couple of guitar players, one whom I remember well, because he brought his twelve-string with him and in the evenings he’d sit on his bunk and pick out bluegrass tunes.  When I heard him playing, I went down there to listen to the pleasant diversion of his talent.

Somewhere in Vietnam that bit of music died in a flash of fire and metal, as did several of my other classmates.  I and three others, by some strange twist of fate, ended up on Korea instead of Vietnam.

My Memorial Day includes a time with the ghosts of the ones I knew personally.

Wasn’t always in combat, either.  This was also the center of the Cold War, and training is dangerous in its own right, from the kid who was perforated in an accident at a rifle range in basic training to the crew who died when their sixty-ton tracked recovery vehicle rolled sideways down a hillside at a training area in Germany.  Dead is dead. Service is service.  One of those guys in that recovery vehicle was wearing a shoulder patch from a combat tour in Vietnam.  Survived ‘Nam.  Died in Hohenfels.  In the service.

My First Sergeant in Korea was a veteran of the Korean War.  One day he told me to go get the jeep.  We took off across the countryside.  He knows places.  Had faces to go with them.  His Memorial Day.

I guess that’s the thrust of this little screed:  America has a Memorial Day.  Many of us, though, have faces to go with it.