In America, a special day was set aside to honor those who fell in the great fraternal conflict that was the Civil War (or, if you prefer, the War Between the States). The first observances were likely held in the South, though this is far from settled. On May 5, 1868, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union Army veterans, declared May 30 to be ‘Decoration Day,’ and that year the first large-scale observance was held at Arlington National Cemetery. Not until after World War I were official observances expanded to honor the dead in all our country’s wars. In 1971, Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday and so that everyone might enjoy a long weekend, changed its traditional May 30th date to the last Monday in May.
Our honored dead. But what about our equally honored wounded? (And such are the advances in modern medicine and the rapidity with which the maimed and wounded are now evacuated from the battlefield to behind-the-lines treatment facilities that many more who would have died now survive.) What about those who have lost eyes and arms and legs, those who are doomed to live out their lives in unutterable sorrow and, disgraceful as it most certainly is, all too often forgotten by the country they served?