It is Memorial Day here in the United States, and in all my years here at Top Comments I have never written a diary on this day. I have a number of relatives in my immediate family who served — my father and older brother in Korea, his younger brother and my mother’s closest cousin in Vietnam, and I am sure many others in the extended family; we are extraordinarily lucky that as far back as I know my geneaology, everyone who went to war came home alive.
Almost every Sunday during Memorial Day weekend, there’s a piece we read at church and it affects me deeply every time. It’s The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak, by Archibald MacLeish. I have no better words to offer today than these:
THE YOUNG DEAD SOLDIERS DO NOT SPEAK
Nevertheless they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.
They say, We were young. We have died. Remember us.
They say, We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.
They say, We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.
They say, Our deaths are not ours: they are yours: they will mean what you make them.
They say, Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say: it is you who must say this.
They say, We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning: give them an end to the war and a true peace: give them a victory that ends the war and a peace afterwards: give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.
As we jump the fold and check out tonight’s trio of Top Comments, Mojo and Pictures, here's a cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, by Six-String Soldiers, a five-member group of active-duty soldiers, part of the US Army Field Band. Their youtube channel is here.
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