Remember them, to never forget

When I was growing up in northern Indiana, we called the holiday coming up next Monday “Decoration Day.” It was first celebrated in the village of Waterloo, N.Y. in 1865 and then made official by order of the first commander of the Grand Army of the Republic on May 30, 1868. This holiday was created very specifically for honoring the patriotic dead of the American Civil War by decorating their graves.

In Decatur, Ind., in the early 1930s, I helped celebrate Decoration Day for precisely the same purpose it had been created. I carried flowers to the grave of my grandfather, Capt. Robert C. Patterson, who was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga on Sept. 20, 1863 ? a battle in which the Union forces suffered more than 16,000 casualties and the Confederates more than 18,000 ? in a single lethal day, almost one-fourth of the American casualties in all of World War I.

I have a letter my grandfather wrote from the field hospital where his wounds were first treated to the young woman who would become my grandmother. In the formal prose of that day, he pledged his eternal love and hopes for marriage when his wounds allowed him to go home. Both pledges were fulfilled.

I was never privileged to meet my grandfather, but I heard many stories about him from my father and uncles. He had five smashing daughters ? my mother was the youngest ? and suitors were required to sit on his front porch and listen to his war stories as a condition of courting his daughters. I was told that the stories improved dramatically in the telling over the years, and how I wished that I might have heard them. But he died two years before I was born, so we connected only on Decoration Day, when I tried to reach into his soul at his tombstone in a cemetery in Decatur.

By the late 1800s, many communities across the country had begun to celebrate Decoration Day, and after World War I, it began to be called Memorial Day as it reached out to honor those who died in all of America’s wars. In 1971, Congress made this official by declaring Memorial Day a national holiday to be celebrated on the last Monday in May.

Can you name those wars? Or guess which took the greatest toll? Measured by the total number of casualties, the current war in Iraq has already surpassed the Persian Gulf War, the War of 1812, and the Spanish-American War. Next in order are the Mexican War, World War I, Vietnam, the Korean War, World War II, and ? by far the worst in American casualties ? the Civil War.

I can’t make it back to Indiana to lay a flower on my grandfather’s grave, but I can think of him next Monday and tip a drink in his direction. He would probably be pleased to know that his grandson spent four years in the U.S. Navy, 75 years after his war, to defend the country he had helped to preserve intact. My devout wish that I might have listened to his war stories reminds me that the people who fought World War II are rapidly moving offstage. If you have any interest in finding out what it was like then, you might use this year’s Memorial Day to corner one of the 5.7 million Americans who are still around ? and maybe place a symbolic flower with your questions.