In honor of Memorial Day
“You smug faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you’ll never know The hell where youth and laughter go”
—Siegfried Sassoon, English poet and WWI veteran
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“We were the children of the 1950s and John Kennedy’s young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship’ in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.”
— Joseph Galloway, from the prologue of his book “We Were Soldiers and Young,” co-authored by Col. Hal Moore
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“For the first time, I realized that the experience of fighting in a war, seeing friends shot and blown up, is not something one ever gets over. The memories stay with us to our graves. They haunt us just below the surface of our consciousness. Hints of what lurks in the darkness of our minds occasionally appear as tears when we allow ourselves to think about our wartime lives.”
—Todd Lander, of Tehachapi, from his book “Bound by War.”
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“I crawled over the bodies, all still. The 1st platoon just doesn’t exist anymore. One guy had his arm blown off. There was only some shredded skin and a piece of bone sticking out of his sleeve.”
—PFC Jack Smith, son of noted ABC news anchor Howard K. Smith. LZ Albany, the IA Drang Valley, Vietnam, November 1965
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“I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.” —from “With the Old Breed,” during the
Okinawa invasion 1945
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“When you give death, you give your own life — every time.”
—Janet Morris, author
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“Dead Marines and NVA still littered the ground, lying in grotesque, macabre positions. Stiff cold hands could be seen raised toward the sky in supplication, asking to be taken to a place of peace.”
—PFC Dave Gustafson 1st Platoon, M Co, 1st Marines at Bing Son, April 21, 1967
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Einstein Once Said That God Doesn’t Roll Dice
Those of Us That Have Walked Into the Ambush Kill Zone Know
That in the Minutes after the First Shot Rings Out
God and the Devil Himself Do
—Andy Wahrenbrock, Bakersfield veteran
and amateur poet
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“I started out with 123 men, and by the time I got through the village I was down to 41.” —Capt. Jay Vargas, 4th Marines at Dai Do,
Viet Nam, May 1968
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“You count up your dead, every one. Always. Recall them, each and all — every face, every heart.”
—Janet Morris, author
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“If you are able, save for them a place inside you and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the place they can no longer go.
Be not ashamed to say you loved them, though you may or may not have always. Take what they have left and what they may have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own.
And in time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace these gentle hero’s you left behind.”
—Major Michael D. O’Donnell at Dak To, Viet Nam 1970