We make an easy assumption that Memorial Day is for those enlisted men and women who fought on behest of the military and died in action. The belief is that: they must be military, and they died because they were protecting our way of life.
I understand the sentiment; I was listening to Mike O’Meara Show podcast and I heard Mike give a chilling recollection of his mother’s first husband’s death in battle, and how the military came by to inform her of the news. He annually gives a shot out to this fallen soldier and all the others as a testament to their sacrifice.
I don’t think the founders of Memorial Day, those South Carolina black slaves, felt the same way, and neither do I. Lately my heart has been with those left behind, and those that like the slaves, made the effort to promote dignity in a space where those that passed may not have deserved it.
You can read it for yourself; several slaves created a solemn ceremony to honor the soldiers who fought on both sides during the Civil War, and in a sense, to pray for the time when no such wars could take place, for no such slaves could exist in America.
I’ve always felt uneasy about the aspect that today is just for enlisted soldiers. One of my favorite clients also happens to be one of my favorite human beings on the planet, and he is a retired Richmond firefighter. He never carried a gun in his line of work (at least he wasn’t supposed to); he was never a threat to take out any life; his job was exactly the opposite, he was there to preserve life as best as he could, and to go into harm’s way to do so. Thank God he isn’t dead; but he saw death on the job, and he cared for people during his career, and for those of his comrades who fell before him, I would say that theirs was an even more noblesse oblige than others who came from privilege and never had the stain of racism and prejudice to stifle them.
My mother had a Vietnam vet friend who came to visit every now and then, usually to drink and cut up. I remember a time he stated how he killed 129 Vietnamese, and he was waiting to get the 130th, while he stared me down. He wasn’t bragging; to me he was speaking as if he had some unfinished business, and he was as serious as I had ever seen him. As a 9-10 year old, the only thing I could think was “I don’t have any Vietnamese in me; only some Chinese and it’s not that much man…” I never thought of him as a hero, or someone to be memorialized. I never asked him what type of Vietnamese people he killed, because I didn’t want to know the answer—I had a feeling that some were women and children. Again, he did not die in battle, yet I am sure that many of his ilk did, and I would hate to think that deserves my respect. Some people in the military and on the police forces in America simply want a gun and to kick ass, and we shouldn’t let the spinning of this day lead us down that path into thinking anything else. I see our honoring of these men and women as aspirational; I mean, there is a point where people of color, particularly blacks and Native Nations understand far too well that these are the same people who fought to keep us in chains. We’re not asked to pick the decade when we want to honor the fallen; it is a mixed bag of mixed emotions.
On that Memorial Day in South Carolina, all of the dead, on both sides, were buried by blacks. During every big and small battle in the Civil War, the bulk of the handling of the corpses was done either by black slaves, or black soldiers. In places like Gettysburg, after the fighting was over, blacks had to go in and clean up the dead, confronting all what decaying truly means. When you go to an old military cemetery, (certainly most everything before the Korean War) remember that those bodies were killed and remained out in the open to decay, buried to avoid decay, then exhumed, then prepared for transport, then unpacked, then reburied again by blacks.
My grandmother (with her Chinese grandfather represented the largest part of my Chinese ancestry), had a mother who purposely did not raise her, was now the caretaker of this woman for the last two years of her life as she battled cancer with one arm that usually held a cup for spitting tobacco. That woman, my great grandmother, was abusive, rude, condescending, vulgar and hateful. I vividly recall frequently saying hello to her, and having her slam the bedroom door, sometimes inches from my face. My grandmother would not allow me to retaliate in any way, and told me to maintain myself in my attitude with her. I was in the house that day; you know, that day of reckoning, and my grandmother called me back into the room. She said “I need you to help me turn momma over…”
I was the only one in the home with my grandmother, when she had to wrap this dead woman and prepare her for the coroner for removal. I was 16. For a moment I was scared, but then I came back to me, and I was angry. Very angry. I hated her in death and I felt I should now be allowed to hate; I hated what she did to my grandmother all those years and how she never showed compassion, or grace, and how I continued to have to, even while she was gone. My grandmother lived until 90, but I swear that her mother took a decade off her life, and ruined the last decade she had. In the thirty years that followed my great grandmother’s death, my grandmother never complained about her mother, even when I mustered up the courage to do so in adulthood.
Saturday, I went to the Port Chicago military base, with 18 people, most of them our Boy Scouts. I had been trying to arrange this for our troop for months. After taking scouts to two other National Parks in early Spring, I asked around how to get into Port Chicago, and I met the lead guy who made it happen. I wanted these scouts to learn about how the WWII explosion that killed over 300 men, (more than 200 were black) was in our backyard, and how the incident said more about heroism in the states than any bravery in a battle overseas ever could.
The rangers were also honoring the one year anniversary of a fallen ranger; no, he did not die in the act of duty—but his dedication to making Rosie the Riveter Park a reality and making Port Chicago’s story known and accessible to the masses of Americans was in itself an uncommon act of bravery in the line of duty. And to top it off, he is the nephew of Betty Reid Soskin, a lecturer and the oldest National Park Ranger in America, and she is based in Richmond. And she is the most articulate person I have ever heard speak, and it’s not even close. It is because of the sacrifice of her family that we have a Rosie the Riveter National Park. None of them died at the hands of the enemy so we honor them not.
The enemy.
It is a strange term; for most of the American experience, the dominant culture has always attributed the enemy as to a foreign power seeking to infiltrate and destroy Americans and our interests. However, for the nonwhite of us, we have been fighting battles on two fronts most of our existence, most of the time with home grown enemies. The soldiers at Port Chicago were responsible for handling all ammunition being stowed on ships headed for the Pacific. All soldiers handling the ammunition were black; all the officers were white. Everyone knew this; so when the ammunition was being made, before it arrived to Port Chicago, soldiers along its path would write messages on the bullets; in the movies, we hear that these tough Americans would write things like “take that Japanese, Bye Bye Hitler,” or something to the effect that this one is for the enemy. In reality, much of the messaging was sent to black soldiers, and it included all of the taunting and despicable language all of these black soldiers heard being levied at them by racist whites. Now, they are the only line of defense between getting this precious cargo on ships, and they are defending a country which has shown a heavy disregard for them. I can’t imagine loading a ship to protect soldiers downstream, while upstream the other soldiers are etching the words ‘boy’ and ‘nigger’ on the machinery I receive. And their military wardens were no different, abusing them while they worked in the hot sun, lack of training, considering them ignorant and lazy and disregarding even the basic of human dignities afforded prisoners of war.
There is no record of these soldiers ever rising up or retaliating; they did their jobs. One day, without a clear record of the actions which led to the tragedy, two blasts, six seconds apart created shocks so strong that most of the soldiers, the ships, and the docks were vaporized. My grandfather told me that he heard the blast in Oakland. He never told me that it happened on my grandmother’s 22nd birthday…
No one had a clue as to what happened; for all they knew, it was the Japanese bombing the Bay Area. I have no idea of what they felt and when they were ‘relieved’ to know that only 300 people were killed. After the blast, the ships in the Pacific still needed the ammunition, so the work quickly resumed, for some. The white workers were given bereavement time off; 3-4 weeks to get their heads straight—while the black soldiers went back to work immediately; this time, in addition to loading the ammunition on the ships, they needed to clean up the debris–including the dead men’s body parts. When the 300 objected, because no one knew what caused the explosion or how to prevent it from happening again, they were punished—over 50 were convicted and sentenced to jail for 8-15 years, and the other 250 went back to work, while knowingly receiving bad conduct discharges at the war’s end. Fortunately for the court martialed, they only served time through the end of the war and were released; all received permanent stains on their records, and to this day, Congress has never fully exonerated them.
The ranger stated that these reprimanded and court tried black soldiers, through a variety of acts, opened the doors for an integrated military, and ultimately paved the way for women to participate in our military without having to be forced into specific positions, such as secretary or nursing. Our guide said that she was able to serve in an intelligence capacity, and as her voice cracked, she said that these men paid a debt that can never be repaid.
When these tours began, only 300-350 people a year were able to participate. We learned that the numbers have only tripled since then; 900 or so people a year, in an area that serves 9 million have ever been able to tour the site.
I asked the scouts not to wear their uniforms for the tour. I hadn’t figured that we would be participating in any meaningful way, and I wanted to avoid the look-at-me syndrome that seems to frequent our culture all too often these days. You know, when you’re a child and having the ability to talk in sentences, the first thing you’ll do is ask mommy or daddy to come over…’look at me mommy, look what I can do’. Nothing wrong with that, kids need affirmation for everything they do. But there is something lost in us when adults crave attention at all times, begging, pleading, demanding to be heard. Over the last couple of weeks, I have watched and read about people asking for a litany of things: the president demanding that an opposition stop opposing before he decides to work with them on behalf of America; that Harriet Tubman deserves less to be on a $20 than a past president who fought for slavery and relocated nations of Natives to live and die on reservations; an actor faking an assault in order to get attention and presumably sympathy to spark a salary increase; a series of blogs from kids and younger adults demanding that older adults turn over the reins of responsibility, tutelage and admiration to them, without any action of responsibility to be enacted, and then there are the rumblings of the upcoming seasons of “Real” housewives…
I’m torn because intellectually I get it; people paid a price. People went into harms way and never came back. At the same time, I know emotionally that the people who have paved the road of America for me are likely not those people wearing uniforms. The people who have fought the enemy for me wore tattered rags and blue jeans and hand me downs, lived in slave shacks and underground safe homes and maid’s quarters and ghettos and reservations and Chinatowns and Japanese concentration camps. They weren’t military trained, they didn’t get guns, and they never earned pensions. They were spat on literally and figuratively by America, and they didn’t get the luxury of dying; they had to live with that, day after day, for the rest of their lives. They are more real and more relevant to me than any PT Captain or any bombardier, and they’ll never get Freedom Fighter Holiday.
While we look to honor our fighting forces for their strength in times of distress at the cost of life, please don’t ignore those who did all the dirty work for the people we argue have done the dirty work at the cost of liberty while protecting their lives.
holowe 