This is the day to remember the dead

Today is Memorial Day, and many workers and students have the day off. Few, however, will pause to remember the true reason for the day, which began shortly after the Civil War as Decoration Day, an annual remembrance at which graves of fallen soldiers were decorated by their survivors or descendants. The day evolved into Memorial Day, a date to remember all of America's war dead.

It also evolved into the "official" beginning of the summer tourist season. At a North Carolina beach last weekend, the number of people and the amount of traffic leaped dramatically on Friday. The price of rentals also leaped as this beginning-of-summer holiday approached.

There has been a temptation to focus on World War II casualties and veterans on Memorial Day. This "Greatest Generation," the title of Tom Brokaw's book, forms the foundation of veterans organizations across the country, partly because there were so many of them and partly because they were of a generation that naturally gravitated toward fraternal organizations.

But Memorial Day is not about World War II; it is about all of America's wars, including the current ones in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it is not about veterans; they have their day on Nov. 11, Veterans Day. Some media encourage this misconception, as the Wilson Times did recently in a series of vignettes about World War II veterans, all of whom survived the war. (Call it "round up the usual suspects" journalism.) This day is not a memorial to them; it is not the day to honor them. It is the day to remember their comrades, and all the comrades of all the veterans of all of America's wars — the ones who did not come back to join the American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars or to salute the flag at local Memorial Day observances across the country. This is the day for remembering those who gave, as Lincoln said, "the last full measure of devotion" to their country.

Today, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and other members of a congressional delegation, will stand at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France, and remember Americans who gave their lives. He will be surrounded by those who did not return, those we honor today. Sunday afternoon, the public radio program "Bob Edwards Weekend" replayed interviews with military surgeons and medical personnel from Vietnam as the program celebrated Memorial Day. Despite the heroic efforts of military surgeons at tent hospitals (think of "M*A*S*H") many of the patients died. The war dead of other wars often get slighted in America's adoration of World War II casualties and survivors; World War II was the last war that found Americans truly united in the war effort, and it was a war that involved nearly every American family in some way. But today also honors the war dead of Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Grenada, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan as well as those earlier wars — World War I, the Spanish-American War and all the rest.

Today, I will remember the uncle I never met, my father's youngest brother. He was 19 years old and had left a pregnant wife back at the mill village where he grew up. A sniper ended his life Sept. 22, 1944, in southern France in a town that was supposed to have been secured. He was hastily buried there, and after the war his body was shipped home for reburial. His mother, my grandmother, could not put him in the grave without opening the casket for one last look at her baby, dead then more than a year. It was a decision she regretted the rest of her life.

Uncle Glyn's death was also, as Lincoln told a mother two generations earlier, "so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." Today we honor all those sacrifices too terrible for words.