One war after another assault our innocence

We called them “Mister,” a simple sign of respect because they were grownups and we were not. We didn’t even know their given names.

As Memorial Day approaches each year, my thoughts go fondly to Mr. Aylshire and Mr. Morgan, the two custodians in my village’s only elementary school. They were also my heroes, a fatherless child’s image of what a man ought to be.

Across the street from the school stood a small, vinecovered white brick building — our village’s lone fire station. It had a bay for our single fire truck, an equipment room and a meeting room.

Volunteer firemen were summoned by a lusty siren, which reached every corner of town, even several miles down High Street to the cemetery.

The first to arrive were always Mr. Aylshire and Mr. Morgan, who dropped what they were doing to sprint across the street. Late arriving firemen, which meant all the others, would drive their own cars to the fire.

The cemetery was the scene each year of the solemn Memorial Day service, the ending point for the parade of former servicemen, youth scouting troops, male and female, the high school band, floats made by various town groups and citizens, mostly families of fallen World War II fighting men.

Mr. Aylshire and Mr. Morgan, carrying the flags and flanked by two riflemen, led the parade. It was only a few years after the Great War and both men were veterans. Mr. Aylshsire was in the Army, Mr. Morgan the Navy. Both had seen action.

We stood silently, respectfully, as the flags were posted, Mr. Johnston, the Presbyterian minister, gave his patriotic sermon, the honor guard fired a salute and a bugler played taps, which in the quiet of a tree-lined graveyard held the majesty of the biblical Gabriel.

They say that World War I was the war to end all wars and we, in our ignorance, innocence and arrogance, imagined, despite that failure, there would be no more wars after World War II. There could be no such suffering again, we thought, as we transported ourselves through a town past homes where Gold Star flags hung from front windows.

That was the difference between then and now. Our Memorial Days were in mourning for past and fading memories of the brutish travesty of war, one that we supposed would not be repeated.

It took just five years for our fantasies to be ended. War, though we did not call it that, broke across the world in Korea and America got itself involved illegally, if you believe in the Constitution at all. The fires of that war linger, with the ambiguity of an end that may or may not have come.

It has been one war after another since, all unconstitutional because they were not declared by Congress.

Our tears today need to be not only for the fallen, but also for our failure to embrace peace.