D-DAY
(so soon forgotten)

Yesterday was D-Day.

It almost passed my notice, as it seems to have done for so many others besides. It’s not surprising. The passing flow of time, and the press of all our anxieties of the day, have made it fade ever further into what we now call….history.

For many not yet born, when that raging storm of combat came to liberate a continent held in the grip of a vile and murderous tyranny, it is just that – history – and few today probably don’t even know if any of their kin might have been a part of it. But for those of us who are still around today, who were just too young to be there with that greatest generation of our fathers, uncles, cousins, older brothers, and others whom we knew, we could only helplessly wait in anxious dread on the sidelines, listening for the latest flash of radio news about gains and losses being dearly paid for that day.

No one moved. No one worked. No one hardly did a thing or even thought about fixing a meal, everyone just hung by that radio for the latest news about what was happening over there. It was just that intense.

So we waited, and waited, and waited. My grandmother, ever devout, silently praying, her rosary beads endlessly shifting between her fingers in constant fervent appeal. We teenagers, primed by our school’s –Victory Corps – as war-pups in training, ready to become full-fledged war dogs if ever called, just paced, growled, and prowled about, incensed that life was so unkind, preventing us from being there because of our youth, in what our instincts told us was one hell of a battle, and we unable to add our weight to it because of that. Yes, life was so unfair! (little did we know that in only a few short years our time and turn would come, in a far off place on the other side of the world called….Korea).

Yet, it wasn’t long thereafter, at war’s end, that I was struck by how quickly the events of   D-Day seemed forgotten, as everyone stampeded for the bright horizons of a future – good life-, and leaving it all behind as a brief and terribly bad dream.

So struck by that I made note of it only two short years beyond that D-Day on a small piece of scrap paper, which then found itself  stowed away in a beaten up old footlocker, to slumber there,  forgotten,  for almost fifty more years, until I decided to clean out that old locker. It almost never saw the light of day again, however, because it had been stuck between the pages of a notebook. Fortunately, riffling through the notebook’s pages before getting ready to toss it out, that scrap fell out.

Though its paper as quite fragile and my youthful scribble very faded, I managed to transcribe it. Here’s what it had said all those years ago:

Well, we Americans have a strange way of honoring any of our dead from battle. It only took sixty years to finally honor that Greatest Generation for WWII. It only took some forty years to honor their sons for Korea, and, it only took some thirty years to honor their grandsons for Vietnam. Who knows how long it will take to honor those for Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for all of those still missing from all these conflicts who knows how long, if ever, these too will be honored? C’est la vie, and it was ever thus.

CENTURION