There was a Memorial Day service held on the Village Green in Park Forest last week. You were not alone if you missed it. Almost all the residents of the community that once prided itself on being a haven for veterans returning from a great war were someplace else.
As usual, the national anthem was played, the bugler performed taps, an honor guard shot their rifles, a large flag was folded triangularly and wreaths were placed near a plaque inscribed with the names of six village residents who died in combat.
The few witnesses to the ceremony, which included five of the seven village trustees, seemed to be the same faces one sees year to year. Apart from a new speech by the new mayor, the 30-minute ceremony seemed to be a rerun of previous years. Time is the great leveler, and the only difference between the years is that some of the faces once seen at the event are no longer there.
Someone asked if there was a way to get more citizens to attend the event.
People forget, I thought. People do not want to be bothered, I imagined. People do not understand, I assumed. People don’t care, I feared.
The connection between the ceremony the Park Forest American Legion Post 1198 performs each Memorial Day and the distinguished history of the village which was built as a haven for veterans returning from World War II still lives. Some 20 or so years ago, the post spearheaded a move to designate with special street signs the 18 thoroughfares in the village named for Illinois recipients of the Medal of Honor during World War II.
There is this fragile distinction in our nation’s memory between our annual tribute to the military on Veterans Day in November and a slight pause to note our military dead on Memorial Day in May.
History tells us It used to be called Decoration Day and for 102 years, or until 1970, it was a national holiday always celebrated on May 30. Then Congress changed it, making it a day to be observed on the last Monday of the month. Despite the mattress sales flyers and sales pitches for outdoor grills, Memorial Day is a solemn event that needs to stand apart from other national holidays.
Since we are not engaged in bullet-by-bullet encounters with an enemy and daily casualty figures are no longer tallied, the significance of the day is often disconnected from a normal holiday pattern of life. The significance of the day, a community paying tribute to those who will never return, goes unnoticed.
Those who served in war, however, always see things with different eyes.
The great American war correspondent Ernie Pyle once wrote that people at home cannot understand that the misery of war “is a spouse that tolerates no divorce,” adding the sight of dead men in wartime becomes such a familiar sight and something people at home cannot understand.
“To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back,” Pyle wrote. “You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.
It was not always easy to forget the dead. If you were of a certain age, living through World War II, some family on your street or whom your parents knew lost one of their own. A Gold Star flag in a window was a visible symbol of mourning.
We were one of those families. A cousin for whom I was named was killed in action. It was during the battle for Okinawa. Sniper bullet. June 14,1945. He was one of 14,000 killed in the battle for the island and one of 235,000 American deaths during the war.
There are some things one should not forget.
On my desk is a small vial of sand scooped up from Omaha Beach in France, the site of the first landings on D-Day on June 6, 1944. Tuesday marks the 79th anniversary of the event.
Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.
