Memorial Day

It was a fragment of conversation overheard in the office elevator as I left work Friday afternoon.

Two men were talking as I entered the car. Both appeared to be about my age, somewhere in their mid-fifties.

“This was in New York?” the taller man asked.

“Yes,” the other replied. “They were all servicemen just back from Iraq. I bought them all drinks.” The man was short, a bit stocky, but well barbered. He wore a navy blazer with shiny brass buttons.

“The thing is,” he said, surprise evident in his voice, “they were all just kids. Just kids!”

The car reached the lobby. As I slipped out behind the two men, I couldn’t help wondering why the man in the blazer had been surprised at the youth of servicemen just back from Iraq. Wars have always been fought by the very young.

I was 19 when I got my summons early in 1971. “Greetings from the President of the United States,” the message began. Richard Nixon’s signature was at the bottom.

I didn’t want to go. I was not a pacifist, but Vietnam seemed (then and now) all wrong, a horror. Try as I might, however, I could find no acceptable alternative. I had discarded the idea of taking flight and going to Canada – some inner voice wouldn’t allow it. And I lacked the courage for the kind of open resistance to the draft laws that would have required me to risk prison.


In the end, I surrendered to events that seemed far beyond my control at that point. Little more than a month after the summons came, I was running sand trails at Fort Ord, an M-16 slung over one arm, a steel pot bouncing on my head, and a heavy pack digging into my shoulder blades.

I was just a kid and no great shakes as a soldier. One experience in training stayed with me for a long time. The object was to learn something about basic cover-and-fire tactics. We were divided into attackers and defenders, paired into teams and given goggles and air rifles filled with BBs. The idea for the attacking team was for one partner to lay down fire while the other advanced.

Compared to some of the other training exercises, this one was fun. It was a little like the cowboys-and-Indians we played as kids. We leapfrogged from bushes and rocks and trees under a hot sun, firing our BBs at defenders we couldn’t see.

At one point, I heard rustles and whispers from some brush just a few yards ahead. I reacted like war movie characters I’d seen, leaping forward, firing BBs at the whispering brush as fast as I could. Suddenly I heard a metallic “ping” front and center on the steel pot covering my head, then another.

A whistle blew. Our drill sergeant emerged into view.

“All right, everybody, time out,” he said, smiling at me. “I just want to bring to your attention the fact that McGarry here just got his head blown off. That’s usually what happens when you run right at a target. You all got that?”

That thirty-four year-old memory and the conversation overheard Friday in the elevator both came back to me with some force Sunday afternoon. My wife and daughter and I were on our way to Santa Monica for dinner and a concert, when we decided, in a nod to Memorial Day, to make a brief stop at the Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood.

The cemetery is a moving and impressive place any day. Nearly 85,000 gravesites are spread out on 115 acres. The northern portion has slopes and rolling hills. The southern half extends long and flat to Wilshire Boulevard, with tall rows of trees forming stately lines of sentinels all the way down.

There is a handsome Spanish revival chapel and a columbarium (vault with niches for ashes), both built as WPA projects in the years before Pearl Harbor.

Interments began in 1889. Some of those interred in Westwood were killed in action. Many others survived their war and were buried as veterans. The site holds the graves of fourteen Medal of Honor winners, mostly from the Civil War or Indian campaigns.

The cemetery takes on a special look on national holidays, with small flags planted at every marker and tombstone by volunteers from the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. When I arrived with my family Sunday afternoon, there was a strong breeze and the flags waved like ripples on the surface of a pond.

We parked and walked, stopping to read inscriptions on markers, until we came to a statue of a Civil War soldier, stoic in bronze, forever at parade rest, gazing out over the long rows of markers between the lines of trees.

My daughter, a bright and very curious third-grader, had some questions. What was the Civil War all about? Is Memorial Day just for soldiers killed in the Civil War? How many World Wars were there?

Finally: “Dad, were you in a war?”

I tried to explain briefly about Vietnam. Then I explained that I had been in the Army during the later years of the war, but had not been sent overseas and did not fight in the war.

I kept it as simple as possible for my daughter, but the grown-up version wasn’t much more complex. I finished basic training at Ft. Ord, then went to radio school and supply clerk school. Graduation meant a few weeks’ leave. After that, my orders were to report to Ft. Lewis, Washington, for transfer to Vietnam.

My leave was a time of brooding. I was conscious of my mediocre soldiering skills and struggled with unhappy premonitions. Sometimes I remembered the sound of the BBs striking my helmet that day at Ft. Ord and worried about what lay ahead.

Then, dumb luck (and Richard Nixon) intervened. By the fall of 1971, “Vietnamization” was in full swing and more and more combat operations were being turned over to South Vietnamese forces. It was now the official view that there were more U.S. forces in Vietnam than were needed. Shortly before my leave was up, Nixon went on TV to report that 100,000 U.S. troops would be withdrawn by year-end.

When I reported to Ft. Lewis, I found my orders had been changed. I spent the remainder of my active duty behind a typewriter at Ft. Carson, just outside Colorado Springs, Colorado.

For all my premonitions back then, I’m now a 53 year-old with gray hair, a timeworn face, stented arteries – and a daughter just finishing third grade. But if I no longer have premonitions, I still brood. I worry about the war and strife my daughter will see in her lifetime.

Sunday afternoon, however, she listened to me calmly and attentively as she and her mother stood with me under the bronze Civil War soldier. When I finished my story, she looked up at me very earnestly and said, “Dad, I’m glad you didn’t have to go. I’m glad you didn’t die in a war.”


I gave her a hug and looked out over the great pond of flags rippling on the ground between the trees. It wasn’t hard to imagine a gathering of ghosts emerge and come over to watch us – young men, strong and fit, smiling at the innocent words of a child, but profoundly sad. The sadness would be for all the summers lost, the children never born, the things that will never be.

So young.

Just kids.


B&W photo from Narional Archives