This year, more than other years, the weekend was clearly focussed on Memorial Day. We determined to visit Arlington National Cemetery. Choosing one of the three busiest weekends in the calendar, we parked in the Pentagon and spent some time at the 9/11 Memorial, commemorating the 184 people who died there. It was a sobering half hour, taking us back to that awful day, pondering its aftermath. It set me thinking about memorials and narratives—remembrance of loss, tragedy, and too often human foolishness, and the stories we tell to help us come to terms with such events.
As long as I can remember, I have found cemeteries peaceful places. Arlington National Cemetery is no exception, but the sheer scope of place is overwhelming. We walked for over half an hour through row upon row of headstones and did not make it from one side to the other.
We happened to be there at the same time as a number of Vietnam Vets who had come to Arlington to pay their respect to those who had died, and to take part in the Rolling Thunder Freedom Ride around the capital on Sunday. It was moving to read their patch-filled vests, each vest a memorial itself to the distant war in which they had fought. Yet, the patches were troubling too. The event each memorial Day weekend, when thousands of bikers gather in DC, is called "rolling thunder," and many of the bikers had "rolling thunder" displayed prominently across the back of their vests. This gave me pause for thought.
Between March 1965 and November 1968, "Operation Rolling Thunder" was the massive US bombing campaign of North Vietnam. Considered mostly a strategic failure the USA and South Vietnam dropped 864,000 tons of munition, killing around 90,000 people, mostly civilian. Nearly 500 US pilots and crew were killed, captured or, missing in a action.
The annual biking spectacle is very impressive, with thousands of bikes—eye candy for Harley lovers—and lots of noise, but I could not work out whether this was a celebration of Operation Rolling Thunder, or a memorial to their comrades who had died in it, or a belligerent celebration of American military might. Donald Trump, who made a short appearance during the larger event, suggested it was the latter. I was not sure how many in the crowd shared his viewpoint.
Yet with so much loss of life, and strategic failure to boot, a narrative is necessary to make sense of it, to give it at least some semblance of meaning. Patriotic narratives are often of the glory of death in the cause of national greatness. The soldier's narrative is often, more honestly, that of having been together in some great enterprise—however ignoble the cause, however foolish the generals, we fought and suffered together. It is a narrative of comradeship, of solidarity, and is more hopeful as it speaks to the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of terrible privation.
There is another narrative still, and is the one told at the foundation of Memorial day in the USA. On April 25, 1866, in Columbus Mississippi, women laid flowers on the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers, honoring the dead on both sides of the Civil War divide. Perhaps here is a narrative that honors in memorium and testifies to the foolishness and tragedy of human conflict in war.
So, a weekend of contrast for us, joyfully being with family, pondering the tragedy of war.
+Ab. Andy