This Day Wasn’t for Fortunate Sons
[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]
Six years ago — what seems like forever ago — I published a post about the origin of Memorial Day.
Today’s All-American holiday didn’t come about in one fell swoop. Its origins have been a bone of contention — did it begin in the South? did it start in the North? Was it an African American celebration?
Depending on who you ask you may find yourself in a discussion not unlike those surrounding Confederate statuary — fraught with past and present politics.
And good old-fashioned racism.
The first large formal observation of this holiday was marked by African Americans of Charleston, South Carolina in 1865 when their Civil War dead were reburied.
Read more about it at Zinn Education Project.
Most Americans aren’t aware of this history, not even lifelong residents of Charleston. The reason is racism manifest through cultural erasure.
I live in the first state to declare Memorial Day a statewide holiday. In 1871 Michigan set aside what was then called Decoration Day to pay tribute to its war dead. We lost more than 14,000 of the 90,000 men sent to fight in the south — about 3.5% of the state’s population lost to the Civil War.
A Union soldier from Michigan wrote to his wife,
The more I learn of the cursed institution of slavery, the more I feel willing to endure, for its final destruction … After this war is over, this whole country will undergo a change for the better … Abolishing slavery will dignify labor; that fact of itself will revolutionize everything … Let Christians use all their influence to have justice done to the black man.
He was killed not long after by a Confederate sniper.
We sent this man and others, our flesh and blood, to fight for what is right, to defend a more perfect union, to defeat the denigration of fellow Americans then enslaved. We’ve allowed the lingering toxins of the Confederacy to obscure why it was this nation went to war — not because of states’ rights but because of an economic system dependent upon the reduction of humans to mere chattel.
We’ve sent our family members to defeat oppression in other wars, too many paying the ultimate sacrifice.
Now we’ve strayed from fighting for the ideals our country was founded upon. What was once defense against oppression has become offense for corporations, serving the US ill over the long run. It has become an excuse to create profits for the military industrial complex while ignoring the exercise of soft power through diplomacy. Our friends and loved ones who’ve died or have been injured or sickened for life are merely collateral damage along the way. …
Now more than ever before it is critically important we remember not only our war dead who defended our nation, but the Americans who commemorated their war dead in the face of oppression, thereby establishing this holiday.
Remembering all who served regardless of their sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religious creed, national origin, physical or mental disability is absolutely essential in the face of the current administration’s politicide, ethnocide, and cultural genocide by erasure.
This year, instead of news stories about statues to prominent figures of the Confederacy being removed from public spaces, statues that represented crypto-celebrations of white supremacy, we are instead faced with widening gaps where Americans who served with honor and distinction once appeared, as these examples show:
Trump’s anti-diversity push comes for Arlington Cemetery’s rich, diverse history
To comply with the administration’s anti-“DEI” policies, the cemetery has scrubbed its webpages on minority veterans and Black history.
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/arlington-cemetery-black-veterans-women-history-website-dei-trump-rcna1965861st all-female veterans Honor Flight from Chicago photo pulled from Pentagon website after DEI order
President Trump issued executive order to get rid of images, words related to diversity, equity, inclusion
https://abc7chicago.com/post/operation-herstory-1st-female-veterans-honor-flight-chicago-photo-removed-pentagon-website-trump-dei-order/16065051/VA Dismisses Directors of Centers for Women, Minority Veterans
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/01/30/va-dismisses-directors-of-centers-women-minority-veterans.html
They’re celebrations of white supremacy but this time wholly overt. We should not be passive about these excisions because they cut out our own.
And when I say our own it’s personal for me; my father and sibling are AAPI and veterans, and they are proud of their service. It’s infuriating to watch white supremacy treat them as if they never existed.
Commemorate ALL the veterans who served this country today. Honor them further by defending their living compatriots who earned benefits that should not be arbitrarily stripped from them.
This day belongs to ALL of us as Americans and not just some hateful fortunate sons.
Right on! Exactly what I feel yet could never articulate as well as you have here, Rayne.
Thank you for bringing your father and siblings service to the foreground. I’m a bit off – recovering from some awful bug – but I hope I can convey how much your work is also a great service to all who read here, many blessings to all who serve the common good.
My life was in no small part shaped by my dad’s military service. In honoring his service I’m acknowledging what the G.I. Bill did for us by educating my dad and assuring access to loans and other benefits he wouldn’t otherwise have had as a dirt-poor mixed race kid from Hawaii. Military service benefits have been not only a way to reward our military personnel but an important continuous economic stimulus program that helped make our country great.
More than 31% of active duty are not white, with the Navy being more diverse than any other branch — and both my dad and sibling served in the Navy.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-military-a-demographic-overview/
Hope you’re perking along back to normal soon, have a restful and safe holiday!
thank you verymuch for the eloquence and your continued commitment to the truth during this dark period during the reign of corporal crypto grifting bonespurs.
i am a transgender person who enlisted at 17 and while deployed with the 82nd Airborne was promoted to sergeant e5. i decided not to reenlist and was, among my awards and commendations and medals given an honorable discharge.
Thank you for your service, daphne.
You did well to exit before the lying, transphobic hatemonger that would have become your CiC began his current rampage against our service members.
I had to look up AAPI: on Oct. 23, 1992, PUBLIC LAW 102-450 designated May of each year as “Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month”.
I also saw that, on May 16, 2025, Trump did “hereby proclaim May 2025 as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.” A redundant edict? But it permitted specific mention of Usha and her parents…
Your comment propelled me to look at the history of AAPI month a little more closely.
Not least because it intrigued me that the Trump Regime Proclaimed AAPI month on 5/16/25, which struck me as odd, being more than half way through the month, and so seemed somewhat of an afterthought.
This Library of Congress Blog blogpost from 5/12/11
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2011/05/asianpacific-american-heritage-month/ Sets out the history of Pub L 102-450 and its precursors.
The blog notes that in 2011 Pres Obama responded to s2(b)
“FEDERAL PROCLAMATION.-The President is authorized and requested to issue annually a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe the month …”
by issuing a proclamation on 29/4/11 this heralding the imminent arrival of the Congressionally mandated month in which
“to recognize the history, concerns, contributions, and achievements of Asian and Pacific Americans;”
A trawl through this archive
https://guides.loc.gov/asian-pacific-american-heritage-month-legal-guide/executive-branch-documents#s-lib-ctab-34311327-7
Shows that typically the Proclamations are issued in the latter days of April, and the latest since 2009 was May 1st itself, twice by Obama, until this last Proclamation by Trump.
I appreciate that issuing edicts has become a thing for him, and so perhaps that’s the sole reason for de-prioritising this proclamation?
Of course there was also this
‘On January 20, 2025, the Trump administration’s Initial Rescissions Of Harmful Executive Orders And Actions eliminated federal recognition of the month.[3]’
Rayne,
I want to thank you for your heat felt focus on this Memorial Day and it’s historical record. Racist erasure is alive and well as you point out with compassion and evidence. Both of my parents served in WWII Navy and Father also in Korean War. We are in this together. I thank all veterans for their service and sacrifice. Thank you for all you do. We are in this together. Peace.
Thanks Rayne. Honoring/remembering those who died in service, means both always questioning the motivation of those who decide that men and women should/must be sent to war, and never forgetting the perspectives of those who are sent and suffer the consequences of that decision. In the view of these ”unfortunate ones” the reluctant “foot soldiers, cannon fodder, pigs to slaughter” here are two perspectives (YouTube):
This one violent (trigger warning):
—Doctor Zhivago (3/10) Movie CLIP – Stick Together (1965) HD
This one sarcastic:
—Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock: “What are we fighting for?”
Sandor, A Fortunate Son
—Father, WW2 Navy: “too young to get to go to war”
—Father-in-Law, WW2 Marine: Pacific “proud to go; happy to come back”
We were at my parents’ house, after my father died, his siblings who had come, and the immediate family, with his two surviving brothers telling stories about their war (Navy, made it to Japan). They were in Tokyo Harbor in August 1945. Brother-in-law was a glider tow pilot on D-Day, and survived that.
(My family tree has places like Leyte and Iwo, though not many.)
While I don’t disagree with a word you wrote, I have mixed feelings about this day.
My father was also in the Navy, also dirt poor. but from a privileged family. He entered the Navy in 1940, as a plebe at the Academy, partly for the free education, partly to fight the Nazis. As it worked out, he fought the Japanese.
Off Iwo Jima, his destroyer, the Case. sank a Japanese destroyer that was fleeing the island with about 300 valuable Japanese — not all were detailed to fight to the last bullet. When the Americans threw lifelines to the swimming survivors, none accepted; all chose to drown.
About six months earlier, Case was hit by a kaiten suicide submarine at Ulithi. In the one other kaiten attack on a destroyer escort, nearly the entire crew was killed. In the Case attack, the warhead appears to have broken off and sunk rather than exploding.
I have no idea what my father thought about these things. When asked about his best war experiences — a cocktail arty staple in the ’50s — he would say it was the time he was dealt four clubs and nine hearts. He came back from the war a world-class bridge player, but he never spoke a word about what he had done, except once, when we asked him about the samurai sword he brought back.
The sword, he said, had been used to chop the heads off Australian prisoners. When my sister asked, why did the Japanese officer give it to him, he replied, “He wanted us to be nice to him.”
Long after my father died. I worked with a former Marine who had watched the Japanese women throw their children off the cliffs at Marpi Point on Saipan. He was dying and he wanted to talk to his family about it, but they would not listen. He said he had the diary he kept. I asked to see it.
When I gave the diary back to him, he wept.
In their own ways, both he and my dad were killed by the war.
My father did not commemorate Memorial Day. I don’t know why. I don’t either, but last year I took my grandson to place flags on graves with his Cub Scout pack. The Scout leaders meant well, no doubt, but what an empty day this is.
Thank you for reposting and for putting it in the present day context.
Honoring all is such a simple, yet profound, foundation for America.
Thanks for this insight, Rayne.
And all your work
Well said.
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short and common, your username will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. /~Rayne]
How do you scrub the slave history of Robert E. Lee’s former plantation and the Civil War that led to Congress appropriating it to bury the war dead?
“Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who . . .”
Thanks Rayne for this poignant reminder of how dyfunctional our national narratives are.
Here’s another good Charleston Racetrack remembrance piece by Denise Oliver Velez at dKos:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/26/2323517/-The-Memorial-Day-history-forgot-The-martyrs-of-the-race-course
Make America Broken Again might as well be the catchphrase of the current GOP.
“Sex in the 1980s was my personal Vietnam–I’m like a great and brave soldier”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQcTOxaW62s
He didn’t understand any of it. (I think about my brother and a couple of his HS associates: brother is CO, achieved with a lot of letters to his draft board (and maintained to this day), one friend went to the Coast Guard Academy (and retired as a captain, with a degree in history and praise for his work in designing research ships), and the third refused induction and was still in when Nixon declared that war over.
Chrisanthemama,
Your post and link said it all. Psychosis is real. If you or any one you know needs help call 988. No. 47, will never make that call. We are in this together. Peace.
spot on, Rayne.
“..It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no senator’s son, son
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no..”
This day is for those unfortunate joes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEq51RZdU5c
The clip of Stern interviewing Orangeman makes me sick to my stomach. Vietnam was not a heroic war but all too many died in it. I survived it physically but the emotional and social too persists to this day. My wife just finished reading “The Women” a novel about nurses who served. I met some of them at the time. They and the medics suffered as much if not more than others yet they are being erased from history by Orangeman. Bad enough me being a pariah for a decade but this erasure is beyond the pale. I’ll go take a long solitary walk across the fields nearby where nobody will say “Thank you for your service.”
One of my early memories is of six-year-old me, in 1969, gaming out how I was going to try to get through MY draft-eligible years. Neither a good or bad memory, just an odd one.
We tended graves today as part of our Memorial Day observation as well as preparation for an interment tomorrow.
I couldn’t help note the veterans’ graves in this tiny rural cemetery. They served in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The American Legion decorated their graves with a flag.
One stone caught my eye — her name was Helen and she had a headstone identical to the vets on either side of her. Was she a wife or was she a service member in WWII who didn’t get any other acknowledgement? I’m afraid to look further.
Next year I bring a big spray bottle of Wet and Forget to clean the moss and lichen off their stones.
I’ve seen women who were in the military in WW2. (One was a Marine.)
I heard once about one who was a dispatch rider, and took a motorcycle out for a spin, astonishing her kid and his friends, who didn’t know about that part of her past.
This woman shared the same last name as a handful of other veterans all buried with feet of each other. It looked a family who’d served in all four conflicts — both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam — over three generations.
She would have been 46 when the US entered WWII; it could have been a son or two also buried beneath veterans’ headstones. The untold stories at which these stones hint…
Aged 23 in 1917, she could have served as an Army nurse in France?
I am a Nam era vet, fortunate to serve in the Navy in a non-combat role. In ’62 I was ready to fight to save the world from Communism. By ’66 I was of the mind that if I didn’t go around shooting at people maybe they wouldn’t go shooting at me. And then, Kent State. At times of war memorials I often remember a very poignant song by CSNY: Find the Cost of Freedom.
” Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Goodnight”
Last song on Four Way Street.
Simply, thank you Rayne, for both the history, your own story, and reminders of what still must be done.
I’m not certain if I posted this here on a past Memorial Day (may have). Encompassing a range of ideas but focused and infused with a thoughtful purpose, it remains the best, the most meaningful Memorial Day essay I’ve ever read. There are sentences—whole paragraphs—that made me think, if I could say that , then I could call myself a writer.
When it was first published (May 30, 2022), I sent it to a bunch of my large Idaho extended family, to the thanks of many, and the response of a couple accusing me of insulting them (well, if they thought it insulting, yeah, kinda).
(I followed Theodore Johnson when he was mostly a military affairs analyst, before he started with The Bulwark (anti-Trump and what I call lessons-learned-conservative) and then to his current WaPo columnist slot)
War is immense egos playing lethal geopolitical games with other peoples’ children.
I went to war knowing that “they” would only get my body – not my heart, soul or intelligence; thinking that people more knowledgeable than me are making the decisions. I went to war only to learn that my innate resentment of authority was justified.
We were already married for a year. I had just graduated from engineering school, and had taken a corporate level job in Cleveland, 60 miles from Canada. My draft notice arrived the same day as our small shipment of household goods after living for a month on one towel each, one plate each, a single fork and knife each for my wife and I. We did not unpack. Instead of going to Canada I brought my wife back to New Orleans and surrendered my freedom. The geopolitics were not important to me; just that I knew I did not belong in the regimented structure of the military. To this day I consider it the worst decision I ever made.
Upon arriving in Vietnam during the Battle for Hamburger Hill. I was assigned to the 101st Airborne, who were leading the senseless charge up a well fortified strategically unimportant hill. Luckily for my white privileged ass, because I could type 20 words per minute, I was assigned to the administration company where I spent almost a year typing Army Commendation and Bronze Star award certificates that came on computer printouts of all soldiers regardless of achievements. You got the Army Commendation metal if an officer did not intentionally remove you from the list after 5 months in country; the Bronze Star after 8 months. Everyone got them.
I had the pleasure of typing my own orders rejecting my own medals because “enlisted man does not want gratuitous awards”. Also rejected my purple heart for “being bitten by a mad dog while drunk in Hue” awarded by some mischievous friends who could do it. Clerks run the Army, and admin company clerks could do almost anything – many stories for another time.
I do not know where or who I would be had I gone to Canada, but my shame remains to this day for not being cognizant enough to make a principled stand. Jimmy Carter was correct in granting amnesty to those who fled. Even the cowards who used fake medical reasons for avoidance made a better decision. I was the only one of my contemporaries who went, and was a bit older than most of the black men who were impressed off the streets of places like East St. Louis and used as cannon fodder.
So I do not cry for Memorial Day victims, I am crying right now for the enduring insanity of homo sapiens.
This Memorial Day, I watched a bit of teevee documentary about World War II. In the part about the London blitz, the narrator referred to ‘innocent’ civilians, unlike — one supposes — guilty military men. But that’s not how it works in a modern mass army. Whether you go, and whether where you go is dangerous, is entirely random.
The odds may vary a little depending upon your social class (contrary to liberal imagining at the time, dark skin did not put a man in greater danger in the Vietnam war, apparently thanks to the atrocious state of black America’s health and education), but except for a very few who left the country, there was not much one could do about it. Toward the end of the draft, a psychiatrist in my city was giving anyone who asked the medical version of a get-out-of-the-draft-free card; and rich creeps like trump got the same deal, but for the 99%, it was almost entirely chance.
I do not care for your implication that civilian targets are okay in war. You can stop that shit right here and now.
I also don’t care for your racism. Most fortunate sons weren’t Black.
Your notion of “chance” hasn’t much in common with mine.
One would think a former newspaperguy would know that the laws of war distinguish between civilians and uniformed military. The latter are legitimate targets. The former are not.
A former newspaperguy would also know that anecdotes are not history. In 1967, for example, African-Americans accounted for 11% of the US population. But Black men accounted for over 16% of inductees. Might be because less than a third of them were rejected as unfit for service, whereas 61% of white men, like Donald Trump, were found unfit for service.
Your source material is flawed, as are your assumptions about who was at risk in Vietnam. While Black men accounted for 11% of the overall uniformed military during Vietnam, they accounted for 23% of personnel in country, more than double that in elite units, such as the Airborne.
And it is not hard to find that black soldiers were very over represented in combat roles and had a much higher casualty rate. The actual racial percentages for each of the divisions in Vietnam is not easy to find. My memory is that the 101st Airborne was mostly white. Of the 200 or so in the admin company, I can only recall one black man.
I’ve questioned every US foreign war and besides WWII they all come up short on the military ‘saving our freedoms’.
That said, those who went to war and didn’t come back or came back broken is to me a separate issue. If some of them were monsters and there were those, and there were those who let their monster out in war as well but I accept at face value that most all sacrificed themselves and give respect.
Conservatives think death gives life meaning. That is the devil talking. It’s life that is meaning.
Thank you very much for this post today
I have been so scared by the JD Vance comment about sending our kids to war – I took it as a threat : (people magazine isn’t usually my go-to)
https://people.com/jd-vance-promises-parents-their-kids-will-have-american-made-weapons-if-they-go-to-war-11732399
JD quote from the article:
“As an American parent, would you like to — God forbid, if your country goes to a war and your son or daughter is sent off to fight—would you like to know that the weapons that they have are good, American-made stuff, not made by a foreign adversary?” Vance continued.
Here’s my contribution today:
https://poets.org/poem/dulce-et-decorum-est#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20most%20admired,France%20on%20November%204%2C%201918.
How would Vance know? He topped out as a corporal, and was a journalist in the back areas.
Yup, and yet he is in a position to scare me by threatening to send my kids to war
Monday evening I went for a bike ride to a Union cemetery. I’ve driven past it many times but never visited. It was about 7:00 and I was the only one there. I stopped at each grave with a flag, about 50 of them. There are vets going back to the Revolutionary War. I thought about my grandfather and uncle who fought in WWI and WWII. But the grave that stood out was a vet who died in 1945 at age 17. I found myself feeling grateful and sad and then furious at Trump for trying to destroy what they died for.
Then last night on PBS we watched the documentary Make Peace or Die. We cried our eyes out. I highly recommend watching it.
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/make-peace-or-die-honor-the-fallen/
My great-grandfather was in the Union army in the Civil War. (He survived.) He turned 21 a week after it ended.
His older brother was in, too, and survived. Both have a lot of letters that survived, and older brother kept a journal, most of which survived. It’s surprising how much they sound like modern soldiers. (Some of the equipment and terms are not that different: rubber blanket = poncho, dog tent is obvious, and “bug out for Atlanta” was clear.)
Blurb does self-publishing for writers like myself. A book based on those letters and the diary could make for fascinating reading, especially if it could, here and there, be contextualized by a historian, and by photos. Jest a suggestion…..
How exciting?!, new warfare tech?!
https://b17news.com/a-17-year-old-designed-a-cheaper-more-efficient-drone-the-department-of-defense-just-awarded-him-23000-for-it/
Thank You for this discussion, Rayne and All!
My daughter (who serves in the Royal Canadian Navy) and her ship were in Norfolk, VA for the Memorial Day Weekend. She said it was a great experience (her first ‘overseas’ deployment) and felt good in being able to acknowledge and share Memorial Day with our allies (our Rememberance Day is on November 11th).
Sean