"On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a token of the honorable and faithful service of your loved one."
"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
-Abraham Lincoln, excerpt from the Gettysburg Address
Today the troops are honored, respected, and remembered. Women soldiers are made a big deal of, like Jessica Lynch's homecoming, and care packages stream in from everywhere. Camouflage is a fad, dogtags are fashionable, the military seems to be the latest "hip" thing. Everyone knows that our men in uniform are fighting for freedom in Iraq, and everyone but the protesters support them - even those who don't like Bush.
That is all very well, but it has not always been so. This song, "Didn't I?", is for the soldiers of Vietnam. The military and the soldiers were hated, spat upon, and despised. There were no bands, no flags, no honor guards to welcome them home. Some had families waiting, but for others their only family was the men they bled beside. They went to war because their country ordered them to, but in the end they fought not for their country or their flag - they fought for each other.
The movie, "We Were Soldiers", about Lt. Col. Hal Moore and the bloody battle of Ia Drang brings this out clearly.
Didn't I make you proud,
Go and lay my life down when you called my name?
I thought I stood for something; was doing the right thing
When I went away
Now being back should be so simple
But I keep getting these mixed signals from everyone.
Why do folks sit and judge me
Who ain't seen what I've seen or did what I done?
Didn't I burn, didn't I bleed
Enough for you?
I faced your fears, felt pain
So you won't have to
Didn't I do my best
And wasn't home here when I left?
I've seen boys fall to pieces
Grown men cry out to Jesus til they're black and blue
I thought God was on our side
Weren't we supposed to be the good guys
That would never lose?
Cause I don't see no ticker tape;
No five-mile parades saying,
"Thank you, son"
Just folks who sit and judge me
Who ain't seen what I've seen or did what I done
Didn't I burn, didn't I bleed
Enough for you?
I faced your fears, felt pain so you won't have to
Didn't I do my best
And wasn't home here when I left? 
In Flander's 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.
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.
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.
About this poem: McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. Here is the story of the making of that poem:
Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood there, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.
As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.
It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:
"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."
One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.
The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.
In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.
A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."
When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:
"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word 'blow' in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene."
In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on December 8th, 1915.
|
