Why Monday isn’t the United States’ real Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day, the real Memorial Day not the one the U.S. Congress re-dated to please Americans by giving them another three-day holiday weekend.

The original May 30 “holiday” was intended as a commemoration of our war dead.

When government officials changed the date to the last Monday in May, they inadvertently changed it from a solemn remembrance of lives lost in battlefields and patriotic conflicts to a three-day excuse to barbecue, picnic, sun on the beach and any number of other extended weekend activities.

Yes, I have a vested interest in this date debate, although I suspect few will argue with me because everyone loves three-day weekends. Something was lost when the date was changed. There are fewer Memorial Day military and veterans parades, less national attention to ceremonies at cemeteries and war memorials, fewer red poppies worn.

Although Memorial Day covers wars from the American Revolution onward, the poppy tradition is linked to the World War I poem, “In Flanders Field.” The Canadian physician and poet John McCrae wrote it in 1915 while riding in the back of a battlefield ambulance in Belgium near France. May 30 is a good day to become re-acquainted with his words:

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

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We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

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Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.”

My vested interest in this discussion is my own parents who are buried at Barrancas National Cemetery at Pensacola Naval Air Station. That is where they met near the end of World War II, married shortly thereafter and birthed four children. The last daughter, amazingly, was born on Memorial Day (the real one) when the family was stationed in Japan.

My mother, “Cotton” Louella Murray, dropped out of college and became a Navy WAVE (acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) during WWII. My father, Roy Louis Bergeron, fought in the Pacific, including Pearl Harbor where he was stationed when the Japanese attacked.

In those days, husbands and wives could not both serve the military at the same time, so mom became a post-war housewife.

I remember fondly the trip mom and a grown-up me took to Pensacola when she recalled her first day in the Navy barracks. She went into the showers only to come streaking out stark-naked when a giant roach flew at her. Being a Pennsylvania hills native, she’d never seen such a big Southern bug.

Dad later graduated from Officers Candidate School, and his intellect and patriotism led him into the field of Special Weapons. When I was 13, he became a casualty of the Cold War, dying from a cancer caused by exposure to nuclear radiation from atomic bomb tests. Putting his story together is not easy because his records were top secret.

One of my grandfathers, Guy T. Murray, fought in France during WWI, but it wasn’t the battlefield he told us about. The images of the war-torn, starving children of France forever stayed with him.

Nine of my uncles also became veterans of various wars. So yes, I feel my family has a vested interest in Memorial Day as a time to remember those who served their country but were not among the survivors. Many reading this will have their own family stories to retell.

Are you familiar with Willie McBride, the universal soldier of all wars? Every Memorial Day I listen to Eric Bogle’s “Green Fields of France,” and although it historically centers on the first world war, everyone should listen to it. Eric is an Irish songwriter and singer who cuts to the heart’s quick:

“Well, how’d you do, Sergeant Willie McBride?

Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside....

Do all those who lie here know why they died?

Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?

Did you really believe them that the war would end war?

But the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,

The killing, the dying — it was all done in vain.

For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again,

And again, and again, and again and again.”

I mean this as no treatise for or against war, for we have done it since the beginning of humankind. War leaves veterans and causalities, so we must have a Memorial Day.

Interestingly, the origins of our official commemoration are a bit muddled, with more than 15 U.S. communities — both in the North and South — claiming Memorial Day origins linked to the Civil War.

The tradition of memorializing the war dead, of course, is older than any official U.S. Memorial Day, with ancient Greeks honoring their war dead long after they died. Fast-forward to the 21st Century and at least six other countries have official days to remember their war dead.

In this country, assorted post-Civil War “Decoration Days” morphed into a widespread May 30 Memorial Day after cities and states began to make the observation official. By WWI, the day had evolved into a remembrance of all military who die while serving their country.

From 1868 to 1970, most calendars indicated May 30, a date linked to the most publicized of the Memorial Day origin stories. That changed when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was enacted in 1971, establishing the last Monday of every May as a national Memorial Day

Observe it on Monday if you wish, but I choose today, May 30, to listen to Eric Bogle:

“Did they beat the drums slowly,

Did they sound the fife lowly,

Did the rifles fire o’ ye as they lowered you down?

Did the bugle sing The Last Post in chorus?

Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?”

Kat Bergeron, a veteran feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at BergeronKat@gmail.com or at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923.