Most Memorial Days I manage a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. That will not happen on this Monday. I don’t guess, given the state of the Covid-19 pandemic, that I will even venture into the District of Columbia to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. Unless things change shortly, I will stay home and think about the fallen, those I knew and those I did not.

I’ve posted on Memorial Days past:

“Memorial Day 2017–Paying Homage to Marine Classmates of 50 Years Ago” https://www.fanande.net?p=508

“Memorial Day 2017-Remembering a Solemn Duty” https://www.fanande.net?p=523

“Memorial Day 2018-Some Scenes, Some Thoughts” https://www.fanande.net?p=579

In those posts I thought of comrades who gave there lives believing they were defending the liberties of Americans. I think of them today. But I also must think of those who have died and are dying during this pandemic. And as I think of them, I can’t help but ask again, as those of us who put on uniforms of US military services have asked of themselves when taking our oaths, “What have I sworn myself to? What will be my solemn obligations? What will I be giving up to carry out those obligations?”

The members of my Marine cohort of 1966 knew their obligations included going to war in Vietnam. We also knew that our personal preferences stood low in the priorities of our service obligations. We knew our faces would be shaven daily, our hair cut weekly, our uniform standards and civilian clothing expectations non-negotiable—not subject to our whims or any sense that we had a “Constitutional” right to those choices while we were in service of the country and others (underline “service to others”). Invoking the Constitution to object to wearing a tie or getting a haircut under such circumstances was simply unimaginable.

Most Americans understood that sacrifices were in order during a crisis on the scale of World War II, at least I am not aware of any law suits objecting to rationing on Constitutional (or any other) grounds. Not having researched this, I can only guess, but in that emergency, it is hard to imagine a suit, if filed, could have succeeded.

All of this speaks, of course, to the anger, sometimes violent, over requirements or requests to wear face masks to reduce the risk that people will unwittingly spread the coronavirus to others. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that since World War II ordinary citizens have not been obliged to sacrifice even small freedoms to help advance a national cause. The chief obligation seems to have been to stand at sporting events and applaud men and women in uniform or first responders of one kind or another—all deserving to be sure, if somewhat tiresome to those for which it is intended.

Now, in this “war,” all Americans should think of themselves as combatants. How then is being asked to suffer the discomfort of facemasks to protect others too much to ask? How can such a small matter be such a grave infringement? I would ask those whose names appear below, “What is too much to ask in the service of fellow citizens?”

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In memory of those many who have given their all in other wars. av

Postscript: Today (May 25) I received and read an emailed essay Maya Lin had written about her thinking behind the design and her experience in the competition and the completion of the memorial in 1982. She was only a senior at Yale when she entered her drawing into a design competition her architecture class fortuitously learned about. It was a competition that would draw more than 1300 entries. She wrote the essay soon after she designed the memorial, but it wasn’t published until the year 2000, when it appeared in the New York Review of Books. The above image, with B Company classmate Matthew O. McKnight’s name at the center, demonstrates precisely what Ms. Lin hoped to achieve. Read “Making the Memorial,” Maya Lin, November 2000.”