Memorial Day, 2010
The picture above is of my father, on the right; his sister, in the middle; and his older brother, on the left. His older brother was the subject of birthday remembrance on this blog Feb. 14th, The Birthday of My Uncle Con, in which I told some of the story of his loss as a bomber pilot over Germany in World War II.
To my amazement, I received responses to this post in the Contact Me section of this blog with further information from German researchers on the details as they found them surrounding my Uncle’s death. I am very grateful for this sincere effort and for learning, in the cruelest of ironies, that my uncle’s plane went down only 39 miles (63 kilometers) from the origin of the Hake family in Hameln. Some of the details, important details, are significantly different from the timing and the facts as reported to the family at the time of the crash, details that I will not go into here, for it is not my desire to drag the family back through considerable pain. The mysteries are on-going and may point back to the duplicity of the Third Reich.
It is that pain and the loss here that is the point of this remembrance. Memorial Day in America has become for so many of us a welcome break from work and a celebration of the coming of summer. For others, it has become a time to remember the sacrifice of those who paid the ultimate price in defense of their nation, a time to proudly wave the flag.
I will put the flag out today. I will remember the sacrifice. But, this Memorial Day has been made a much more sobering occasion than I have experienced before, because this series of events have made it personal in a way that it was not before.
A blog coupled with a search engine I have come to realize as a powerful tool with few boundaries. In this case, it has served to make a war death personal because I am a participant in on-going discovery of the factual truth and an uncovering of details.
The bigger truth is this, that the death of my uncle, heroic as it was, is not acceptable and is tragic. He should have lived out his life with the siblings in the picture above and with his mother – who never really recovered – and his father. He should have had his own children and job and home. He should have known the fullness of life lived long.
Honor those killed in these battles? Yes.
Glorify those battles? No! See them for the tragic waste they are. Make it personal. Deplore them. Help find some way to stop them from happening again.
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