‘… We wish to be remembered’

With the announcement Wednesday that Army Spc. Beau R. Beaulieu, a young soldier from Lisbon, had become the 10th member of the armed forces with ties to Maine to die in the war in Iraq, the state’s Memorial Day weekend observances will take on special meaning.

The deaths of Beaulieu and the nine others who have given their lives in a war that seems destined to become as unpopular in some quarters as the Vietnam War of decades ago will weigh heavily on the minds of Mainers participating in remembrance ceremonies on Monday. But the dead of other wars, fought by other generations of Americans who also answered their country’s call to arms, will by no means be forgotten.

“We do not live for self. We are part of a larger life reaching before and after, judged not by deeds done in the body but in the soul. We wish to be remembered. Willing to die, we are not willing to be forgotten,” declared Gen. Joshua Chamberlain, Maine’s pre-eminent Civil War hero and former governor, in a Memorial Day address in 1884. We wish to be remembered…

And remembered they will be. In the nation’s capital, the long-awaited World War II memorial will be dedicated, barely a week before the 60th anniversary of the D-Day storming of the Normandy beaches that spelled the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler’s evil plans for world conquest.

Closer to home, Vietnam War veterans will be remembered in a ceremony at the Cole Land Transportation Museum in Bangor, where an impressive bronze memorial featuring three figures – a wounded American soldier, his buddy and a nurse – will be unveiled. The statue complements memorials for World War II and Purple Heart veterans on the museum grounds. A memorial honoring Korean War veterans is located across town at Mount Hope Cemetery, and veterans of other wars are memorialized at other sites.

Parades, followed by Memorial Day orations will be the order of the day in communities from one end of this great country to the other. Burial grounds, from the West Coast to hallowed Arlington National Cemetery to the most humble churchyard in the St. John Valley, will be freshly mowed and bedecked with wreaths, miniature American flags and flowers. At some, stoic uniformed riflemen will fire several volleys and a lone bugler will sound taps, the living paying solemn homage to the dead.

With each passing year, the ranks of the veterans of our more distant wars thin and we remember their bravery second-hand, through our history books. Few people living today were around, for example, when the World War I exploits of Sgt. Alvin York made headlines. The Tennessee sharpshooter won the Medal of Honor for practically single-handedly killing 25 Germans, capturing 132 others and knocking out 35 enemy machine guns in the battle of the Argonne Forest.

“It’s over. Let’s just forget about it,” the modest Sgt. York said upon receiving his decorations, which also included the French Medaille Militaire and Croix de Guerre and the Italian Groce de Guerra. Later, when exploiters tried to get him the war hero to endorse their products, he simply said, “This uniform ain’t for sale.”

Hundreds of Maine’s hometown boys marched off to fight in World War II and never returned, giving their lives that America might remain home of the free. Hardly a Maine family was untouched by their deaths. Then came Korea, when 233 more Mainers died and 50 went missing in action, followed by Vietnam, when 339 others made the ultimate sacrifice. Subsequent conflicts in Somalia and Bosnia and Afghanistan and now Iraq, for the second time, have taken their toll. Today, the good citizens of Lisbon are in mourning for a young patriot. It seems inevitable that one day soon some other Maine community will likewise grieve for one of its own.

“The day is done,” Joshua Chamberlain said in yet another Memorial Day address before Civil War veterans in 1898. “Now this little hour draws us near, a lessening band, for one more greeting and farewell. You, my comrades, have called to vision again the days that tested manhood, and the forms of those who stood with you, and gave their lives for something they held more dear…”

On this Memorial Day, the “lessening band” from wars past is very much in America’s thoughts, as are their fallen comrades-in-arms who were willing to die, but not willing to be forgotten. Nor are we unmindful of nor ungrateful for the sacrifices being made by our present-day uniformed men and women, even as we pause to reflect.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.