Memorial Day

The second Holiday in the Americana Animist wheel of the year.


Memorial Day is the official start of Summer to most Americans. Sure, most of the kids have  two or three more weeks of school, but this is the first long weekend of the summer. Parties and barbeques abound.


Strange that a solemn feast should be celebrated that way, but solemnity is tough for us, I think. There will be ceremonies at monuments and cemeteries, laying wreaths and and hearing speeches, but after that beer and hamburgers.


Memorial Day never fails to make me sad.


There is only a part of this country fighting a war. They have been fighting a war for years. We see it on the news, but it hardly touches most of us. 

This photo has been floating around the web for years, and it is true. Most of the people who go into the military, go in because there is very little opportunity for them elsewhere. 


Recruiters are commonly accused of selling the military life to people to whom higher education is nearly impossible due to economic constraints and these are kids who desperately want to improve their circumstances.


They come home with injuries that go deeper than skin and bone. For the second year running, we lost more troops to suicide than to combat. 


We're losing these children to failures of leadership. They go, they do what they're told to do. What the leaders tell them is right to do. And then, they come home to a country that doesn't care about them (Don't even make me start about what a nightmare it is to get treated at the VA), to houses in forclosure, and not a job in sight. Is it any wonder the domestic violence statistics for the military are ridiculously high?


Count the significant others of the military veterans who are victims of this war too, and the human cost is astronomical.


While we're on the subject, sexual assault in the military is endemic. Women in the military now have more chance of being  sexually assaulted than being injured in the course of their duties. 


I'm one of those people who've occasionally bought a serviceman their lunch anonymously. I don't go to memorials or parades. I don't like crowds and the memorials are too sad. I really dislike the rhetoric of "honoring the troops". How about we just stop sending them to wars we don't need to fight and treat the injuries they come home with?


When my family goes to Washington DC, we visit the different monuments. I like the Korean War Monument--life size statues of soldiers, all with thousand yard stares. They remind you

 

 When I worked in the homeless shelter, twenty years ago, we had lots of vets. Its a cliche, isn't it? The veteran who ends up a homeless junkie or a drunk? 


One of the first descriptions of PTSD appears in Norse mythology. It's where we get the term "berserk".


Jonathan Shay, MD, a psychiatrist and researcher in this field, makes a connection between the berserker rage of soldiers and the hyperarousal of post-traumatic stress disorder. In Achilles in Vietnam he writes:

If a soldier survives the berserk state, it imparts emotional deadness and vulnerability to explosive rage to his psychology and permanent hyperarousal to his physiology — hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder in combat veterans. My clinical experience with Vietnam combat veterans prompts me to place the berserk state at the heart of their most severe psychological and psychophysiological injuries.^[12]

Another war word from Old English is fæge (pronounced fa-yah), existing in modern English as "fey". It means "doomed to die". More correctly, I suppose it means someone who thinks they are going to die in the next battle. If they don't actually die, they were said to have their soul already halfway to the next world.


How many of our service people are coming home both fey and berserk?


On this weekend, if you're the type to go to memorials, remember the living as well as the dead.