Memorial Day (and me) 2023

^{↑Above image taken in 2022 with my cellphone, modified by me↑}
My family has been involved with the military most of my life, but then I come from a large family.
Meaning, not everyone has any military background nor involvement.
We actually go back to the American Civil War/War of Northern Aggression.
My grandfather and Great grandfather both fought for the south (of course) but contrary to what most people believe, for us it had little to do with slavery

^{↑Grandfather Daniel Harrison Smith↑}
(I know of only one ancestor who owned any slaves; he had a large tract granted to him for service in the American Revolutionary war. He was also in the Ga Legislature and voted AGAINST secession)

source

Move forward to WW I and WW II, uncles and cousins answered the call. My Brother Jim served in Korea,

He came back a very different man, a farm boy from S Ga couldn't help but be changed by that quagmire
Then came the horror of Vietnam

^{↑My Brother Joe C Smith, about the time I was born or a little before↑}
In 1965, my swamp loving, fishing/hunting brother was drafted.

He left in May 1965, served for less than a year when he was severely burn, white phosphorus covering most of his body.
He lived for 10 days in the burn center on Okinawa before his kidneys gave out. He also had double pneumonia. They wouldn't let us open the casket he was burned so badly.
That part alone I think, broke daddy's heart.

I remember getting off the school bus, walking into the living room where a couple of sisters were holding our mama as she cried over the Telegram from the Army telling of his injury.
A Telegram. That is the way things were done back then.
10 days later, in the cold and dark, they sent two Officers to inform my parents that he'd died.
I remember it well, there was a fire in the fireplace, I heard the vehicle pull up (I was still in bed, I think it was a Saturday morning, I was 9 yrs old) and people talking in the livingroom.
Then Mama came up crying to say he had died.

I went to that Memorial service with my parents, on Ft Stewart Ga. I remember it being a LONG hot parade thing, where they gave a folded flag to my Mama.
After that, one night my daddy got very drunk, passed out in front of a heater. Didn't burn his clothing, but his thigh and buttocks that faced the heater were a mass of blisters.

I myself served in Peacetime, supposedly, which I say because the Nuclear Missile system I served in was always in Defcon 3, prepared for a sneak attack from the Soviet Union.

I wish that we didn't need to have holidays to honor fallen servicemen, but these things are not in my control.
Peace to all is my wish.

We must hate war, avoiding it at all cost,
Sometimes however, it is unavoidable.
We hope that our leaders care about what’s lost,
More than the money for which war is liable.

History is littered with war, lives given to frost,
The Winter of war can seem inescapable.
Yet, history it remains, lessons should not be tossed.
Lessons learned can make us more responsible.

Soldiers follow orders, their courage on time embossed.
Hoping sacrifices will make peace durable.
And the monuments, should they from history crossed?
To forget the soldiers forging crucibles?

The soldier knows not what stories history will post,
He knows he fights for his country; expendable.

“A Soldiers Sonnet”
by
Jerry E Smith
©5/28/17

"Memorial Day (and me) 2023"

^by
Jerry E Smith
©05/28/2023
^{All images that are not mine have been sourced.}