Memorial Day is upon us. It’s the day when some people throw a backyard barbeque, some spend a long weekend at the beach, others hit the retail and online stores for bargains, and the rest of us either hang out at home or work through the holiday.
It’s also the time when we honor those Americans who died in the service of their country while on active military duty. The town where I live decks Main Street with flags, courtesy of our local American Legion Post. National cemeteries feature special activities, like placing flowers or a flag on the graves of the fallen.
And given that it’s Memorial Day, some Americans will visit actual memorials to the war dead. Some of these are more easily accessible than we think. We’re all familiar with Arlington Cemetery, which, because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., often makes the news, but around the country are another 170 national cemeteries. One of these may be close enough to home for a Memorial Day visit.
Moreover, if you’re looking to pay homage to a veteran who fell in battle, many local cemeteries contain individual graves honoring these combatants. In Front Royal, Va., for instance, Prospect Hill Cemetery has served as a burial ground for more than 200 years. The hill offers a magnificent vista of the hills and valleys surrounding the town. Part of a Civil War battlefield, this cemetery features Soldiers Circle, where 90 Confederate soldiers who died in Warren Country during the fighting now lie at rest and where another 186 are buried in a common grave at the circle’s center. Among those interred are the bodies of soldiers from all the Confederate states.
Strolling through the cemetery, you’ll find markers and stones on the graves of military personnel who died in America’s conflicts after the Civil War. In this peaceful place, then, there is plenty of opportunity to pause and pay our respects.
Then there are the larger and generally more elaborate memorials, which are not tombs and which dot the American landscape: the statuary at battlefields like Gettysburg, Antietam, and Shiloh, and the monuments honoring the dead in larger cities like D.C. and New York. Perhaps the best known of these major works of sculpture is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., with its wall of more than 58,000 names and its ancillary statues, the Three Servicemen and the Women’s Memorial.
In a similar way, around the country are other memorials, many of them cenotaphs, simple monuments naming the dead from that locality. These are often found in city halls and courthouse lawns.
Among the nation’s newest memorials is Trussville’s Alabama Fallen Warrior Monument. Dedicated in 2023, this site pays homage to the 227 members of the military from Alabama who died during the Global War on Terror, 115 of them killed in action and 112 in non-combat actions. All 67 counties in the state suffered at least one death during this long war.
“It is said that when a military service member dies, the member dies two deaths,” the Fallen Warrior website says. “The first is when they take their last breath and the second is when they are forgotten. The mission of the Alabama Fallen Warrior Monument is to ensure that second death does not occur and to ensure these fallen service members are not forgotten.”
This is a worthy ideal, yet the truth is that despite all the thousands of memorials around the country to those who have died in our country’s wars – 646,596 in combat and 539,000 from other causes, primarily disease – their names are mostly forgotten. They may be inscribed in stone or bronze in places like graveyards or courthouse lawns, but their identities – who they were, their dreams and hopes, and what they accomplished in civilian life – have vanished with time, the fate eventually suffered by nearly all who have departed the parade of the living.
But the memorials themselves – the graveyards, the monuments – are of vital importance for the rest of us far beyond individual names.
In 2000, Congress passed the “National Moment of Remembrance Act,” which recommended that all Americans pause for one minute of silence at 3 p.m. on Memorial Day to remember the dead. This same document states that “greater strides must be made to demonstrate appreciation for those loyal people of the United States whose values, represented by their sacrifices, are critical to the future of the United States.”
Embedded in this sentence is the most essential reason to observe Memorial Day and to erect and esteem the monuments to the dead. To become ignorant of the values of all those worthies who came before us, military or otherwise, and to be ungrateful for their sacrifices, leaves us without map or compass as we make our way into the future.
The dead of the American past are not dead. If we look for them and listen, they speak to us.
Jeff Minick is a father of four and grandfather to many. A former history, literature, and Latin teacher, Jeff now writes prolifically for The Epoch Times, American Essence Magazine, and several other publications.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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