On This Memorial Day

by Camillo "Mac" Bica

US Army Capt. Ferris Butler sprays on sunscreen at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., in preparation for a multi-state ride to raise funds for cycling programs to benefit injured veterans. Butler was wounded in Iraq on Dec. 21, 2006.
(Photo: Susan Biddle / The Washington Post)

    For many of us who have known war, it has been years since we faced the insanity of man's inhumanity to man. Yet, it haunts us still. It is the nature of war, I think, that we can still recall with frightful realism, the rifle butt and bayonet that forced a weary body to continue the seemingly endless trek of the Bataan Death March, or appreciate the gentle beauty of a snowflake without recalling the blood stained snow banks of the frozen Chosin Reservoir. Not a day goes by, I think, that we do not recall the devastating screams of a comrade who died in our arms while taking and then giving back a useless and desolate hill top in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, or wake up screaming as we relive the horror of the bloodstained streets of Fallujah.

    It is the nature of war, I think, that we shall never forget and need no holiday to remind us. As warriors, we may know little of the politics of diplomacy and international affairs. But no one knows war better than we who did the killing, and the dying, and the remembering, and the grieving. For we are neither war's initiators nor its beneficiaries, we are its victims.

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