To remember

I’m never sure what to remember on Memorial Day.

I’m not talking about neglecting to bring kraut for the First Official Cookout of Summer brats. Anymore, just remembering that the end-of-May holiday was intended as a remembrance of our war dead rather than opening day at the local municipal pool is a rare enough thing. Over the years it’s morphed from a solemn day of visiting the graves of fallen soldiers to a three-day weekend celebrating the end of the work year. It’s more than a shame that happened.

How and why those men and women died merits remembering. Not so much for their sake, but for our own – and our children’s. And their children’s.

Since my days as a Cub Scout I’ve stood at attention Memorial Day mornings while the old codgers from the VFW and American Legion drone on and an unnerved honor student stumbles her way through “Flanders Fields” (Where is Flanders, anyway?), a high school trumpeter plays “Taps” and the color guard adjourns to the barroom while the kids scamper off in search of ice cream. As the years pass, the codgers seem to have become progressively younger, but the meaning of Flanders Fields is no less remote to me than when I was 10.

The fact that ours is hardly a military family likely has something to do with it. Down through the generations the Christensons typically have been drawn more to fields of oats than fields of battle. The first of us arrived here in 1856, and for reasons unrecorded took a pass on the Civil War. Looking after the family farm kept his eldest from riding off with Teddy Roosevelt to make war on Spain, and his eldest, my grandpa, was born too late to go “over there” to fight the Kaiser.

Dad was a bit too young for the second world war and a tad too old to be drafted for Korea. His brothers did Cold War service in the 1950s, and Uncle Syl and Cousin Larry serve honorably, but without firing a shot in anger.

My war was Vietnam, and luck of the draw and vagaries of the draft kept me in civilian clothes throughout.

Consequently, war, for me, is something I read about in the newspapers, see in video clips on TV and reenacted on a Hollywood set. It’s the stuff of history, of other people’s stories, of other families’ sacrifice.

And I’m not entirely sure how to deal with that.

For most of my life my country’s been at war or on the brink of war. I came into the world a year before the Korean War came to an uneasy end and grew up in the shadow of the Russian A-bomb. Vietnam was the backdrop to my coming to adulthood, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Balkans and Desert Storm punctuated my children’s childhood and for the last two decades American forces have bloodied than sands of the middle east and mountains of Afghanistan. Friends have served, fought and died – honorable men and women, all of them, but for that, I have been untouched.

For that I am grateful, and, perhaps, a little bit guilty.

A legendary Confederate wag described that conflict as “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.” True then, and even more so now. For so many young folks looking to a future grim and uncertain at best, the military has become the opportunity of last resort, a route to acquiring the skills and education that those of us more fortunate, affluent and well positioned take for granted. It’s a blood bargain that exacts an unfair price.

So, sometime this weekend we might want to put down the beer and ketchup for a minute and give a little thought to the folks wearing the uniform, carrying the rifles, shedding their blood. Think how they came to be there and we came to be here and how, but for the grace of, there I’d be.

Remember that. Something might change.