MEMORIAL DAY

MEMORIAL DAY

This Memorial Day most Americans will believe that all the soldiers from ours and other countries, who died in combat, are resting for eternity in large or small cemeteries across their respective lands. For the U.S. only, this is more or less true only since the Vietnam War.

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), which was established by Congress in 1923 to commemorate the military dead since 1917 (WWI) oversees 24 overseas military cemeteries that serve as resting places for almost 125,000 American war dead; on Tablets of the Missing that memorialize more than 94,000 U.S. servicemen and women; and through 25 memorials, monuments and markers.

As you read this, an operation to recover and identify the remains of about 400 British and Australian soldiers killed during a WWI battle in Northern France has just begun.

Point of Reference: Only an estimated 60% of the Civil War dead were ever identified. (Source: History Detectives, PBS, air date 7/12/10)

Below is my poem written in a journalistic-minimalist style:

FALLEN SOLDIERS

On distant foreign shores
Like tin soldiers lying in a row
In some forgotten cigar box
Their faded flags no longer unfurled
Forgotten soldiers at war no more