MEMORIAL DAY 2013

This isn’t Memorial Day of course; it’s a manufactured holiday, courtesy of Congress,so we may have a long weekend, which combat veterans seldom got..which maybe shows the true state of our concern for our “Greatest Generation” and those who came after them.

 

As World War Two was ending, the finest writer radio ever had, Norman Corwin, wrote

“14 August”, the day Japan surrendered. At the very end of this CBS special, his script

paid tribute to those veterans who won that war for us. I have no permission, either from

CBS or Mr. Corwin’s estate, to repeat these words for you…but I hope they will accept

them as the tribute I wish to pay them for airing these stirring words, and through them

to pay tribute to our veterans ,too.

America has just learned WW2 is over, and, slightly edited,  Mr. Corwin writes:

“All is accounted for

Except the farmer’s boy,

And the mill hand who lived near the canal,

And the young men from the city block where the gutters fry in summer.

One lies with an ocean across his chest at the bottom of an Arctic deep,

Another sleeps with sand in his eyes where he fell on a beach in Palau.

The bones of the fisherman rest in the clay far from the rocks of Maine,

And the miner’s kid is under the ground of China.

…They’ve given their noons to their country,

They’ve trusted their girls to you.

They are face to face with an ally’s earth

For a bunch of tomorrows.

Remember them in the fall of the year

When frost airbrushes the withering leaf,

And the silo is fat as a bearing woman,

And the cleats of the backfield dig up gains to the praise of the stadium,

When the number-one goose says it’s time to go, and the flock points a V to the south.

They’ve given their seed to the fifty states,

Their football tickets to you,

The shirt on their back is a worm-cut rag

For a bunch of tomorrows.

Remember them in the sleeting months

When the sap stands still in the veins of the tree;

When the skating girls eddy like snow on the rink,

And the storm window hooked on the prairie farmhouse mutters in the gale out of

Idaho.

They’re dead as clay for the rights of men,

For people the likes of you,

And they ask that we do not fail them again

Tomorrow, tomorrow”