Opinion: San Diegans have long marked Memorial Day with the reverence and gratitude it deserves [Opinion]
Memorial Day, in which Americans honor all those who died while serving in the U.S. military, has been marked since long before 1971, when the last Monday in May became an official federal holiday. Alas, many see it only as the unofficial start of summer.
But in a region with as rich a military tradition as San Diego County, the day has always been far more than that, as editorials going back decades show in the San Diego Union, the San Diego Tribune and the outlet those two newspapers merged to form in 1992, The San Diego Union-Tribune. In 1970, as the Vietnam War raged and divided the nation, the Union lamented the Americans who failed to “appreciate the contributions of our fallen” and to grasp that “they died for the concepts that bind a nation together.”In 1975, with the U.S. reeling from both the lost Vietnam War and a national scandal so momentous that it forced a president from office, the Tribune offered both consolation and a telling comment on how common it was for much of the last century for the U.S. to be engaged in conflict in foreign lands: “No American fighting man has been asked this Memorial Day to die in some steaming jungle, on an alien beach or in a muddy trench as this nation ponders a rare and uneasy hiatus from war.” In 1983, with the fallout from Vietnam still very much on the community’s mind, the Tribune saw reason to hope the popularity of the newly unveiled Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., reflected a change in how those veterans were perceived. Instead of their being “ignored and even abused,” the memorial signified that “those who died in the paddies, along the rivers and in the hills of Vietnam” were finally and thankfully being recognized along with those who faced a similar fate “from Bunker Hill to Shiloh ... to Anzio and the Normandy beaches.” In 1984, the Union also touched on this theme, praising the interment of an unidentified American killed in Vietnam at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, alongside individuals from World War I, World War II and the Korean War. “Honoring that Vietnam veteran ... keeps faith with one who kept faith with us.” In 1991, less than three months after the U.S. military quickly ousted Iraqis occupying Kuwait, the Tribune celebrated the patriots who built a nation capable of surviving the 1861-1865 Civil War, thanks to the values they enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These “common bonds became indissoluble only when steeped in the blood of the blue and gray,” a reference to the uniforms worn by the Union Army. In 2003, two months after the beginning of the second U.S. war with Iraq, the Union-Tribune offered thanks “that time, training and technology” had lessened U.S. combat deaths — but noted this had made war seem more distant to many Americans as a result. “For the increasing number of us who cannot recall a particular face or name, this is a day of collective remembrance of ordinary Americans whose faces we never saw and names we never heard but whose deaths came in extraordinary circumstances most of us will never know.” Twenty years later, as advances in technology make war seem ever more abstract and impersonal, this point remains resonant. But it must never diminish Americans’ appreciation of those who have died fighting for our freedoms for nearly 250 years.
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