BY Bill Reagan
Tell a veteran he or she is a hero and that’s how they will respond.
It is easy to slip by Memorial Day. The dead do not clamor for our attention.
First observed in 1868 by order of General John Logan, national commander of the Army of the Republic, Decoration Day, as it was then known, was “… designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.” The list is long. The numbers are sobering: 4,435 dead in the Revolutionary War, 2,260 in the War of 1812, an estimated 1,000 in the various Indian Wars (not counting Native Americans), 13,283 in the Mexican War, 491,332 in the Civil War (both sides), 385 in the Spanish American War, 53,402 in World War I, 291,557 in World War II, 58,220 in Vietnam, 382 in the First Gulf War, 4,501 in Iraq, 2,381 in Afghanistan.
Though the dead cannot clamor for our attention, their numbers do. Nearly a million have died in the theater of war, many more as a consequence of our nation’s military conflicts.
War must be the most awful thing. I graduated from high school after the Vietnam War ended. I’m glad I didn’t have to go, but I can write these words because other young men and women over the course of more than 200 years did go — and died.
Their memory clamors for your attention. Maybe not every war was just. Maybe not everyone who served was a hero. Maybe not every soldier, sailor, Marine or airman who died saw a noble death.
But they died in service to our nation and you didn’t, and that makes them heroes.
Bill Reagan is executive director of Loaves & Fishes of the Rio Grande Valley.
