It's Memorial Day and the usual old men will be reliving their glory and remembering dead friends on the Courthouse green in a few hours. God bless them. It is right that we honor those who have died in the service of our nation.
I always feel kind of uneasy talking about military service since I am not a veteran and the closest I have come to combat is facing down a deranged knife wielding vagrant in the halls of the Ohio Capitol when I was a young assistant sergeant-at-arms armed only with a trash can lid. I regret many things about my life ( only an asshole will say they don't ) and one of them is that I didn't do some type of military service for my country.
Tony Applegate was in his late twenties when he was killed as part of a tank crew in the first Gulf War. Tony and I weren't real close but going from 5th grade to your junior year together in a small Appalachian community tends to make all your classmates seem more like friends than acquaintances.
An incident involving other men from my alma mater during the current Gulf War brings home the added horrors of having 40% of your fighting force comprised of National Guard units. A squad partly of young men from my old high school gets ambushed (if there is any other way these guys are attacked) and one of the soldiers is shot through the neck. As he starts to fall he is caught by his best friend. Indeed war makes best friends out of everyone in a unit but this was literally his best friend from back home. The slightly older crew member (my cousin's husband) who loaded the wounded soldier on to the chopper graduated a couple years ahead of the other boys. Of course Columbus, Ohio's Marine Reserves Lima Company is the most painful example of this situation. My grandfather, Honey, who was wounded as a forward observer in WWII confirmed that in the 95th AA the men were from all over the country. We assume that this is to spread out the casualties among all the nation's communities.
Some soldiers make it home with life altering injuries. My community lost Mike Brown this year. Mike was a Vietnam veteran who came back and taught and coached in his home community. We all know that war never left Mike yet he struggled through it in order to make a difference in the lives of the kids in our community. Anyone who faces combat has to be changed in a way that I am not worthy to understand, but those who are maimed have to contend with not only their mental but physical wounds. I think often about my aunt Helen's husband Bob. Bob was a mere teenager when he left his leg on a German minefield. He hobbled on a cheap, ill fitting prosthesis for the rest of his uncomplaining life. My wife's hometown (Cleveland, OH) friend Tom made it back from the first Gulf as lieutenant of a quartermaster unit only to die suddenly in his early 30s of an vascular incident. The loss of Tom, certainly made us take the idea of “the Gulf War” syndrome more seriously.
Rednecromancer sincerely honors all those veterans who died on the battlefield and at home after their service. We also want to give our thanks to those who are currently doing what their country asks them to do and to ask all of our readers to send out a special prayer for our own SFC Daniel Wilson the man behind Appalachian Patria a member site of the Appalachian Webring.