Memorial
This March I wandered through Arlington National Cemetery and watched the changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The cemetery is a rolling sea of headstones that, like the ocean, stretch to the horizon. It is an image that haunts me. It should be the first place every new member of Congress and every new President goes as the prelude to accepting the oath of office.
Below are words I offered at a reunion of shipmates of the USS Ashland. Since I cannot effect National Security policy decisions directly, I can and you can, speak out for the victims of war, for their families, and for those that survived. I think the Israeli’s have it right. Everyone should do a two or three year tour in one branch of our Nation’s military between the age of 18-24. It might make the decision to make war harder and it would most certainly help the political and wealth divisions we are living through right now.
USS Ashland Memorial
June 22, 2007
It is my honor to be with you this morning as we remember and celebrate the lives of comrades with whom you served on the USS Ashland (LSD-1). What was true for me in June of 1999 when I first gathered with you is true today. It is a humbling experience to find words adequate and respectful of the living memory that you bring to this day. You gather here at the Henry Clay Estate to recall not just shipmates, but friends, would be friends, and people of all ranks who risked their lives alongside yours to ensure that personnel and the supplies and vehicles needed by that personnel reached their destination. Your service as a support vessel capable of dry dock repairs for smaller craft saved the lives of many young men as they disembarked the safety of the Ashland’s docking well for beaches in another part of the world. The service of the Ashland was so significant that the Navy commissioned the USS Ashland (LSD-48) in 1992. It is more than government pragmatism that brought back the name of this proud ship. It is people like you and those not present whose service made the name Ashland alive in the Navy’s memory. And this new vessel carrying the name Ashland stands on the foundation of service and honor of those who first sailed under that name.
Today we remember shipmates and nameless faces of people who sailed with you and through your lives. My father-in-law, Barnie, might have been one of those faces. He left high school six months early to volunteer. He was a supply sergeant in the Army and was with the first wave of troops to set foot in Japan after the bomb that changed our world and warfare forever. My grandfather, George, might have been one of the persons you met in California. He moved heavy equipment and supplies with his Mack truck during the war and in the post-war years. During the Korean conflict you might have passed the USS Navasota and met my uncle Kenneth or the USS Hooper and exchanged stories with my uncle Robert. He was an engineman on the Hooper and with thousands lived through Operation Hardtack 1 and 2 during the infancy of nuclear weapon experimentation. Who did you meet? Many baby faced boys who lied to volunteer and never grew up, good and bad officers, regular people, nurses, doctors, and chaplains seeking to ease physical and spiritual pain.
Seeing you today affirms in my heart that you are, like those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, our nation’s living memory that war is always the last resort. Seeing you today haunts me that I have not kept in touch with my friend, Captain Craig Johnson, an Army Chaplain who just finished his 4th tour of duty in Iraq; or PFC Boone Mooty, a 26 year old who enlisted to help make the world a better place, and is now learning the languages needed to carry the message that America is not an enemy as well as carry a weapon in country when diplomacy fails; or my cousin Orey Meredith, a Marine whose duties somewhere in Iraq have not allowed him to return an email to me in six months. Being here with you comforts me because I can see that those who serve together, stand together long after discharge or a tour of duty is complete. It comforts me because I know that my friends and cousin have comrades that will remember what they did and how they served long after they have left this earth to walk with God. Thank you for the reminder and the honor to be with you today.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand with you today as a person who has only known conflict and war via my television and on film. I am part of a generation that teethed while Walter Cronkite brought us film footage snuck out of Vietnam. With millions I watched as the first Gulf War began on in January 1991. Computer games have changed in complexity, size, and price. Designers have found ways to condition my generation and those that have followed to think of conflict as a game where you can regenerate health by picking up the right pellets, few get hurt, and death means starting the game over. Only the most graphic give a glimpse to the experience of violence, but they cannot capture the why. “Why you stood shoulder to shoulder with your shipmates. Why you did your duty even when you did not agree with official policy. Why you stood up to the CO. Why, you are here today.
Here in the 21st century the internet and computers have brought the war in Iraq closer to us visually, made it more personal as emails and blogs allow family to stay in touch more quickly, but it has also sanitized the violence for our consumption. My generation does not know anything of ration stamps, sugar or real fuel shortages, nor have we been urged to buy war bonds to support the common good. What my generation knows of war are stories from grandparents, relatives, and times when we stumbled across an old box of stuff while helping clean an attic or basement. We have read about battles in history books, visits to museums and memorials, and watched the movies: documentaries, propaganda, and the buddy films. My favorite Navy film is “The Enemy Below.”. What my generation knows of war is that there has never been a time when the people of these United States shouted with one voice across the oceans, no more. No more to tyranny, to the killing of the innocent and unarmed, to the expansion of one armed nation state over neighbor. What we know of war is cold, nuclear, politically debated, and religiously justified, for cheaper food, fuel, clothing, electronics, and the catch all phrase “national interests.”
Your generation knows that war has a human face and a family story. Your generation knows what fear of the ‘other’ can make governments do in the name of national security and foreign policy. You know the stories of the men who called the decks of the USS Ashland home or sanctuary or heaven when the war was hell, the letters from home unhappy, or the announcement of a birth finally arrived. Those of us who breath the air of that freedom need to hear those stories and be reminded of the faces of those who fought and served not simply to raise the flag of patriotism, but to right a wrong in the Pacific theatre, then in Saipan, and went on to serve in the North Atlantic or Caribbean Sea. I’m sorry we have not asked you to speak of your shipmates, sorry we have not listened and learned from your stories.
Author and theologian Fredrick Buechner writes of remembering in his book, Whistling in the Dark:
“When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart. For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost . . . but if you forget me, part of who I was will be lost forever.”
When I was with you in 1999, I said that my generation needs your generation of Americans to remind us, and our parents what it means to be people of character who are concerned for the common good of all people. Those words are more true today than they were then. We need you to raise your voice and demand civility in our public discourse as a way to honor the rows of crosses that dot the landscape of this land and in military cemeteries around the world. Tell the stories of your shipmates and remind military and civilian alike, that we have a responsibility, a higher obligation, to ask hard questions of ourselves and our government when we are deciding to or have put men and women in harms way. Tell us about the men who served on and were served by the USS Ashland as a balm for our grief and anger over terrorist attacks. Tell the stories and read the names with strength and faith that there will never again be a tomb of an unknown, and that one day the human family can celebrate the end of hostilities once and for all. When we do this, we will completely and finally honor the lives of those who died in military service, and those who survived to speak the names and tell the stories until they too pass from this world to God’s kindom where there is no Jew or Greek, male or female, Muslim or Christian, capitalists or communists, foe or friend.
The poet Will Allen Dromgoole writes about the wisdom that your generation has to offer mine and those growing up today:
An old man, going a lone highway,
Came at the evening, cold and gray,
To chasm, vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide —
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pit-fall be,
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.”
For all the bridges that you have built across dangerous chasm after dangerous chasm, and on behalf of generations not sure how to say it, thank you for your service and that of your shipmates. I ask God’s blessing for you who are here, for the many whose stories we have yet to tell, and for the families of those named today. On this day we affirm our promise to remember those who served on the USS Ashland (LSD-1).