Honor

I’m Randy Feldman, and this is the WRCN Middy Report.
Yesterday was Memorial Day. Like at most media outlets we had a full mourning of Memorial Day programming here at WCRN.
After the morning show was finished, I attended the two Worcester events honoring veterans who served and died at war, who died for us, who died to ensure our freedom and way of life.
What I saw at Hope Cemetery and at the Vietnam Memorial touched me. It also shamed me.
The state monument for all Vietnam veterans is housed here in Worcester at our own Green Hill Park, the ceremony and monument is especially touching. It was touching to read the letters home from young servicemen to their mothers, fathers and girlfriends on the granite monument’s columns. They were just boys that went to war- their letters told selfless stories, stories that could be yours or mine or our own children’s. It was beautiful and poignant…and incredibly sad. The letters spoke of human tragedy and of human honor. The experience of being there and hearing from Worcester’s own Phil Madaio, who won what is basically the highest honor for bravery an enlisted man can win -The Silver Star- for holding the line against the Vietcong’s mortar attacks, with only a rifle and hand grenades, in virtually a solitary effort to protect his outnumbered platoon; when one attempts to set him to describe his anchors, instead you only hear deflect all talk of his own heroism with humor and stories of the bravery of other service members he has encountered. Phil Madaio’s actions and being are the true meaning of humility, bravery and honor. He is the real thing.
Anyone who has not been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Green Hill Park needs to go. It’s like visiting the presidential memorials or Vietnam monument in Washington D.C., or the home of the first U.S. Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. You are affected. You are made a better person for having experienced the power of the moment being there in the monuments presence.
Yet, both were also deeply disappointing events. Not on the part of the veterans, on the part of us Americans. You know who was there at the events, almost no one except the surviving veterans themselves, same of their relatives and politicians. There were almost no ordinary Americans there just to pay their respects.
And but for the movie “Saving Private Ryan” I also would not have been there. It was only after my older brother saw that movie when it first came out and he said to me and to all who would listen. “I am so ashamed of myself, as should others be, that these men and women risk their lives and ultimately some die or are maimed for us to live as good as we do, and we do not take even a moment on Veterans or Memorial Day to think of them, to thank them, to pay the debt of thoughtful honor that we owe them. It is shameful. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
So I went to see the movie and he was exactly right. I thought of all the painful sacrifices I have made in my life, first the painful sacrifices to be good in school and sports, then curtailing my personal dreams to be a good parent, then daily going to keep work a job that I did not enjoy so as to support my family and the people I work with, then staying married long after love had left our marriage so as to be a good family man joining my wife in mutual sacrifice for our family. Then I looked at those who actually risked their own actual ability to exist- to continue to live and who sometimes lost their limbs, their sanity, their life and their own families happiness and I know that the pain these soldiers accepted to serve fellow American people they did not even necessarily know, was so far beyond any sacrifices I was ever been called alone to make: All mature adults and good people know the pain of sacrifice. This should be all inspiration need to honor military members and their families, who have felt pain of sacrifice much more than others of us have ever sacrificed in our own way.
Looking around Hope Cemetery and the Vietnam Memorial, there was virtually no one there who simply came to honor those they did not know. It was so clear that those who from military families had treated us so much better than we had treated them.
Then I heard taps being played. The trumpeter first faced us as he played taps for the living. Then he turned and faced backward and played taps again for the dead. I wondered if he should also play the trumpet again to call, and for all those, who were not there.
This is Randy Feldman on WCRN.