Way back as Boy Scout in Hawaii I put flags on the markers in Punch Bowl Cemetery on Memorial Day. In the Fern Township cemetery in Becida Minnesota on Memorial Day they have a service where they read the names of the veterans buried there. They are not forgotten.
Two years ago on Memorial Day 2011 I was driving to work at a warehouse in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. I was up early for this as I usually worked until midnight, I was on mostly deserted roads listening to the news/traffic radio. On the radio they talked of a mother in Tacoma Washington who had lost her 21 year old son the Thursday before to an IED in Afghanistan. I had some idea about how that poor Mother felt because my 20 year old daughter had died from complications from the leukemia treatment a little over two weeks before that.
Before she died Aurora asked me "why", just bad luck was my only answer. That mother in Tacoma would probably never get a good answer as to why her son was in Afghanistan. I have asked both my Senators, my Representative to the House and the President and I've never gotten a good answer as to why we are "still" in Afghanistan.
There are too many young people in the cemeteries today, "why" is the question this Memorial Day. For some it was bad luck, others died in Europe or the Pacific fighting to keep America free, for many "duty" is the answer. In my opinion, "duty" for the fallen is enough, but we the living need to ask "why?".
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