The Washington Post News Articles
The Power of Remembering
May 25, 1981
"By making a distinction between a failed
war and their dedicated warriors, the Japanese have illustrated the
spiritual power of commemoration and the nobility of military
service."
There is strength to be gained from remembering.
The ancient Druids knew this, as did the Greeks, and the
Romans, and the women of the defeated Confederacy after the Civil
War, all of whom made a practice of strewing the graves of dead
warriors with flowers. So did Britain's Prime Minister William
Gladstone, who once intoned, "Show me the manner in which a nation
or a community cares for its dead, and I will measure exactly the
sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land,
and their loyalty to high ideals."
And the Japanese, perhaps, know it best.
I can still taste the mix of warm rain and my tears as I
stood on top of a Japanese pillbox on the invasion beach of Saipan
in 1973, staring out into the emerald lagoon and distant reef from
whence came two divisions of American Marines, 29 years and two wars
before. I had arrived on the island on the anniversary of the
invasion, which took place two years before my birth, and found it
still littered with the artifacts of war: rusted hulks from landing
craft, pillboxes buried to their firing apertures in sand, thick
jungles filled with weapons and helmets and dud artillery rounds.
In the lagoon itself, two American tanks sat forever
frozen in the attack, clanking war machines that had become tombs
for youth making their way onto the beaches of this unknown,
isolated spit of coral. The young Marines in the tank, as well as
3,400 other Americans over the space of three weeks, had given the
ultimate, irretrievable gift to the culture that had nurtured them.
Later, sitting in a hotel restaurant filled with Japanese
tourists, I wondered whether the events of the ensuing years could
justify their deaths. How would I have explained to them on June 15,
1944, that within a generation the very nation they died helping to
defeat, whose soldiers aimed the artillery piece that shot them
dead, would economically dominate their battleground and graveyard
under the protection of their own military? How would they have
reacted if I could have predicted for them that their metal coffin
would become a conversation piece for the children of their defeated
enemy. "History," wrote T. S. Eliot, "has many cunning passages,
contrived corridors and issues." And the unimaginable becomes
unexplainable.
The Japanese, I think, groped with this question from the
other end of the dilemma: how could a nation beaten on the
battlefield find meaning and momentum in the events of its defeat,
while at the same time renouncing war? The answer, predictably for
their culture, lay in their war dead. The Japanese renounced war but
embraced their warriors. It was as if each death involved a transfer
of energy, the soul of the soldier feeding into the soul of the
nation, until the very enormity of Japan's defeat became itself the
fuel for its post-war emergence.
Japanese monuments are familiar sights on Saipan, some of
them constructed at great cost by private citizens. Shinto prayer
sticks dedicated to dead Japanese from those long-ago war years
gather like choked weeds at intersections throughout the island. I
drove to Suicide Cliff, where thousands of Japanese jumped to their
deaths rather than surrender, and watched in awe as one of Japan's
many "search teams" sifted through the dirt at the bottom of the
cliff, patiently collecting flecks of bones in order to give
ancestors and friends a proper Shinto burial. By contrast, the only
American monument was a small cross with a helmet on top, erected in
the early 1950s, which stood forlornly in front of the local Toyota
dealership.
By making this distinction between a failed war and their
dedicated warriors, the Japanese have illustrated the spiritual
power of commemoration and the nobility of military service. Nations
make war; soldiers merely fight them. Win or lose, in a modern
environment war represents the failure of the political process to
manage its external affairs. Win or lose, war represents a nation's
most dreadful and costly human investment, in both immediate and
long-term effects. And win or lose, war is sometimes unavoidable if
a nation is to maintain its ideals and place in the worlds
community. So how do we balance these anomalies and how do we repay
those who have been called upon to defend the interest of our larger
whole?
We begin by remembering, and we remember, collectively, on
Memorial Day.
Formalism does not come easy to Americans. We are
ethnically diverse, historically unsettled and irreverent. We were
founded on the notion that authority is to be suspected rather than
worshipped, and that same casualness carries over into our sense of
country. H. L. Mencken once dryly noted that "it is as impossible
for a civilized man to love his country in good times as it would be
for him to respect a politician," and there may be a morsel of truth
in that. Memorial Day weekend is a time to go to the beach, to watch
the Indianapolis 500, or to have friends over for a barbecue. In
1971, we conveniently made the holiday fall always fall a Monday in
order to accommodate such frolic.
But I would hope that all of us might pause at some moment
during the weekend and contemplate the pain and energy, and yes, the
sacrifice that bought us this full day of leisure. From
those remembered acts and from such contemplations, comes the truest
sense of country.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS