Despite what you might see in the advertisements,\u00a0Memorial Day is not a particularly good occasion for a picnic, going out on the boat, or having a 15%\u00a0off sale on bedroom furnishings \u2013 unless those are things you would normally do at a funeral.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is\u00a0to honor the memory of those who died in\u00a0service.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s\u00a0not Veterans Day, either, but\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0a\u00a0good\u00a0time\u00a0to give a little thought to a certain variety of\u00a0veteran, which might be reason to alter one of the day\u2019s slogans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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See Member Benefits<\/a>Join Our Newsletter<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cAll gave some, some gave all\u201d\u00a0is a fine sentiment, but the word \u201cgave\u201d implies\u00a0that\u00a0it was a donation, which was not the case\u00a0for many\u00a0who were drafted.\u00a0More\u00a0accurate\u00a0might\u00a0be \u201csome WAS GOTTEN from all, whether they liked it or not.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I was one of those draftees.\u00a0When people say,\u00a0\u201cthank you for your service,\u201d\u00a0I respond, \u201cI appreciate you saying so, but it wasn\u2019t my idea.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Sometimes I\u00a0have to\u00a0wonder whose idea it was and whether any judgment went into the decision at all. It is hard to imagine some general going to the\u00a0president and saying, \u201cWhat we need\u00a0right now\u00a0is a 135-pound, nearsighted hillbilly who has\u00a0trouble with doing what he is told to do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What might be the scariest thing about the state of our union at that time is that I was not the worst of the lot. In fact, somebody thought I looked enough like a leader to put me in charge of a group\u00a0of draftees\u00a0being sent off to Fort Polk, Louisiana.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It was a surly group.\u00a0Nobody had any intention of being ordered around by the likes of me or much of an inclination to\u00a0get alongwith anybody else, and the\u00a0day\u2019s\u00a0traveling\u00a0was\u00a0a learning experience. In addition to taking our first airplane ride, we\u00a0were finding\u00a0out\u00a0that cultural diversity can be stressful. Much of the trip was spent glaring and mumbling insults,\u00a0threats\u00a0and racial slurs just loud enough to be known about but not sufficiently audible to call for mouth punching.\u00a0<\/p>\n The second airplane ride of our lives was on\u00a0a\u00a019-seat buckboard with wings, bouncing through a thunderstorm\u00a0and sliding to a stop on a runway with no terminal. We were greeted by a man in rain poncho who called us more bad names in five minutes than we had called each other in\u00a0a whole day\u00a0of mumbling. The fact that we\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0have rain\u00a0ponchos did not hurry this guy up in the least.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We were processed, the shorthand being \u201cfed, bled and put to bed.\u201d\u00a0 An unhappy soldier threw a big bundle of bedding at each\u00a0unhappy soldier-to-be\u00a0and then led us off through the still thundering storm to a tin-roofed barn thing \u2013 our first barracks.\u00a0<\/p>\n We wrapped our drenched selves in our soggy bedding, listened to the rain\u00a0hammer\u00a0the roof\u00a0and\u00a0looked forward to things getting worse. You can see why some of us might have problems with the notion that we were \u201cgiving\u201d what was being gotten out of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was not a\u00a0donation,\u00a0it was an obligation.\u00a0Being sent for instead of showing up\u00a0voluntarily\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0make those who\u00a0did it any less proud of what they\u00a0did,\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0just a special circumstance that\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0happen\u00a0any more\u00a0and\u00a0ought to be remembered.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some of those who\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0come back never wanted to go in the first place. They did it because it had to be done\u00a0for everybody.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Just something to think about while\u00a0you\u2019re\u00a0out on your boat\u00a0on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite what you might see in the advertisements,\u00a0Memorial Day is not a particularly good occasion for a picnic,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140],"class_list":["post-280465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}