A woman in Anchorage who owns a pet-sitting service had a bumper sticker on her Jeep that I was especially fond of: “Support the troops, not the policy.” I was talking with a close friend recently in email. He and I mainly agreed on what Memorial Day remembrance should be about, and not about. He mentioned the Vietnam war, and the [miss-attributed] harsh criticism too many people in this country at the time had for the returning troops from that “conflict overseas” (recalling John Prine).
I replied that this miss-attributed criticism heaped on returning troops was by people who didn’t understand the kernel of wisdom in that bumper sticker. Especially where their criticism targeted conscripts (~1/3 of all troops who fought in Vietnam) – I mean, how stupid and insensitive were those people. A man is forced to go to war to face possible death, or else face jail time, and he’s the target of your scold?! Talk about blaming the victim.
I proposed that maybe Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day should be collapsed into a single holiday of remembrance. If the point is to be grateful to the men and women who made a huge sacrifice to protect our freedoms, then let’s remember them all, both the fallen and the one’s fortunate enough to have returned home alive.
Or, keep the days of remembrance separate, as they are now, but maybe follow up Memorial Day with a companion celebration of raucous contempt for past leaders who got us into foreign wars, frequently on false premises (looking at you McNamara* and Bush), that had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the freedoms of individual Americans. Call it: Anti-Jingoism Day. So that future Americans should never, forget, the folly. Give all Americans Anti-Jingoism day off from work, except for employees of Faux News and other like-minded hawks – their punishment is to write on a blackboard one thousand times the words of that bumper sticker.
* Hat-tip for the confession of folly in his memoir