Memorial Day 2016

Memorial Day.

Remember when it used to be called ‘Decoration Day’? I do, back when I was a kid in the early 60s. It officially became Memorial Day and a federal holiday in 1971, although, in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson designated Waterloo, New York as the birthplace of the holiday. Waterloo has held an annual observance of Decoration/Memorial Day since 1866.

This annual day of remembrance started the year after the Civil War ended, to honor both Union and Confederate soldiers who gave their lives in the four-year struggle. General John Garfield of the Union Army spoke before a crowd of 5,000 people at Arlington National Cemetery ( which had been part of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s plantation at the war’s outset ), after which more than twenty thousand graves of war dead were decorated with flowers.

Since then, Memorial Day has expanded to honor all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our great nation in the name of freedom, including soldiers from wars that occurred prior to the War Between the States.

Here is a non-comprehensive list of American soldiers killed in action in correlation to the wars in which they died:

American Revolution: 4,435. War of 1812: 2,260. Mexican War: 1,733. Civil War, Union: 140,414. Civil War, Confederate: 74,524. Spanish-American War: 385. World War I: 53,402. World War II: 291,557. Korean War: 33,739. Vietnam War: 47,434. Gulf War: 148.

The Global War on Terrorism is still ongoing; as such I can’t include a final sum of American heroes.

Through the Gulf War, over 650,000 American soldiers have given their lives in combat to preserve this great Republic, and untold millions more suffered wounds as a direct result of battlefield violence.

Over six-hundred-fifty-thousand.

On this Memorial Day 2016 I honor those dead, those heroes from just yesterday back to the Revolutionary War. Those long since forgotten and the names of the places they fought. From Bunker Hill to Fort Dearborn; From El Brazito to New Market to Fredericksburg; from Belleau Wood to Chateau-Thierry; from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal to Normandy to the Ardennes to Anzio; from Inchon to Kapyong to the Chosin Reservoir; from Ap Bak to Ia Drang to Khe Sahn to Hue; from Fallujah to Khafji to Qom, and all the places over the last 242 years that most of us have forgotten or don’t know about.

As you enjoy your long holiday weekend…be it at family gatherings, on the road traveling or just flipping burgers on your backyard grill…remember those who made it all possible.

God Bless the United States of America.