MEMORIAL DAY: ” ‘What’s worth remembering about a war, anyway?’
” was the challenge of a cynical high school student to his
American history teacher. What indeed? As fewer and fewer Americans
remain who remember our WWII, and even fewer will probably ever
experience military service, the teenager’s question becomes more
legitimate.”

That’s the start today of a speech given by Jerry Alexis of
Beaver Falls, whose brother Roger Alexis of Bradford passed it
along to us. Jerry Alexis is a retired Lutheran minister. He was an
Army private in World War II and served in the European theater but
was captured by the Germans just before the Battle of the Bulge. He
served in the Army Reserves for 32 years and retired at the rank of
colonel.

The remarks were made in 1996, the memorial service address of
the 110th Infantry Reunion, and certainly bear repeating just
before Memorial Day.

We will need two days to cover the entire text.

He continued, “For the uninitiated to understand what’s worth
remembering, they must first forget the romantic, cinematic notions
of wars past. The Roman poet Horace once wrote: “Dulce et decorum
est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s
country).

“Anyone who’s served in a 20th-century war would find that view
difficult to support. That difficulty would be heightened for
veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, the
Persian Gulf – and now Bosnia – wars that asked nothing of most
Americans, but demanded everything from a selected few. Ernest
Hemingway put things in more modern perspective when he wrote: ‘In
the old days, they wrote that it was sweet and fitting to die for
one’s country. In modern war, there’s nothing sweet nor fitting.
You die like a dog, for no good reason.’

“The truth is somewhere in between these two poles. War is ugly.
It’s brutal. It’s lonely, painful and terrifying. It reeks with a
stench that will never be cleansed from a soldier’s nostrils. It
echoes in ears that will forever hear the cacophony of a machine
gun or automatic rifle. It leaves aches in the heart that can never
be soothed. And despite all efforts to change it, those are the
things remembered. In the VA medical centers, they call it PTSD –
Post-Trauma Stress Disorder.”