Gary G. Kohls, MD
25 May 2010
The U.S. Marine Corps Memorial is silhouetted against the early morning sky during the Memorial Day holiday weekend, Sunday, May 24,2009, in Arlington, Va.
During my rural Minnesota growing up years, I rarely missed a Memorial Day parade or the traditional civic service honoring the war dead that followed the parade. The parade was always led by a WWII veteran honor guard with their flags, uniforms, ribbons and rifles and followed by the high school band and a couple of floats.
Immediately following the parade, there was the solemn gathering that always began with one of the town’s clergymen blessing the occasion with the “benediction”. Somewhere in the program we all sang “God Bless America” and/or the “Star-Spangled Banner”, and that was followed by a boring patriotic speech delivered by some politician or retired military officer. Then the (usually) mercifully short service ended with the pastor praying a prayer for the dead and also for world peace.
Later on during my maturing college years of the 1960s, I was confronted by the harsh reality of the “overwhelming atrocity” that was the Vietnam War. I became aware of the fact that covered-up (and therefore unpunished) international war crimes were being committed by all sides in that war and had been committed in every war in history, no matter which side was fighting the so-called “just war”.
