Memorial Day

Sneaks up on you with a bang!

What to remember?

Memorial Day brings many memories to someone who was born in the middle of WWII. My uncles, members of the “greatest generation” went to war, one who was made a lieutenant in the field, meaning he earned his stripes the hard way. He went to war in the Pacific, won a Purple Heart and other honors, and came out of it alive and with no real animus toward the enemy, the Japanese forces. He once told me they were just people, just like us, though they had been demonized just as Americans had been to them. Matsuoka Roshi talked about the indelible impact that the occupation had after the war, when instead of exacting vengeance and laying waste to the Japanese and German countries, the Western forces tried to help them recover. This was unexpected and unbelievable, and the beginning of the rapport that we now enjoy with our former deadly enemies.

My uncle also fought in the Korean war, and when the Vietnam War threatened to draft me, he advised me to do anything I could to stay out of it. He said there was nothing glamorous about war, the so-called “policing action” in Korea especially, where, among other atrocities, he and his entire unit were intentionally dropped behind the front lines, and experiments in combat techniques were mounted that endangered lives unnecessarily, which he found unforgivable on the part of our strategic leaders. He said it was “just insanity.”   

I was not a draft dodger, but was exempted three times by the Kennedy administration, first because I was a student in my second year of college, next because I was married, and third because by then we had had our first child. The first time around, I was ready to go, and remember conversations with old high school friends from my home town who did. One, sitting across a table in a bar said he could “reach across the table and tear my throat out.” I do not know what kind of unit he was in, but I believed him.

So when I encounter Memorial Day each year, with the hindsight that has seen wars come and go beyond my twenties, when I was resigned to being drafted, and my sense of mortality was lacking, my brain not having finished its wiring; I have to wonder what it is that we are really memorializing each year, on this day?

Other questions arise, after seeing the pattern of intermittent war and relative peace, from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars (nothing civil about it) — including the War to End All Wars and beyond, with their undeniable economic and political underpinnings — again, what exactly are we memorializing?

Is it the willingness of our youth to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of an idealistic dream, summed up in the founding documents? Or the cynicism of those profiteers and their hired gun politicians who promote war for the sake of personal gain?

I also have to ask the question implied by the story of Buddha, consulted by local leaders about waging intertribal war in his time and place. He is said to have offered the wisdom that if both sides would be better off after the war, then it could be considered just. Which of course begs the question, How could you possibly know?

We like to think that WWII was a just war, that the Axis Powers represented true evil, while the Allies represented good. But the actual situation was surely more complex. Simplistic black-and-white interpretations of complex personal relations rarely hold true, let alone for international relationships.

In a time of international crisis, when everyone is looking for someone else to blame, it is even more challenging to grasp the dimensions of the “whole catastrophe” of human history, from the earliest records of the Greek and Roman warring cities to the present-day “War of Ideas” — read ideology — thinly-disguised self-striving passing for debate.

I wish I had the answer that would satisfy everyone. But I do not believe it can be found in the words or actions of others. Our belief in Zen, if it can be called a belief, is that through our practice of objectless meditation — that is, unbiased and open-ended — we can come to the only genuine resolution of these living questions that is available.