Memorial Day – On Sale? | Reinhard Kargl

Today, the United States of America calls upon its citizens to honor its lost military service members. This should be a somber occasion, and I deeply loathe the obsession with partying and “Memorial Day sales” at the malls that have come to dominate the majority’s attention.

Do we really need to stick a “for sale” sign on everything?

The U.S. is currently engaged in two military campaigns, dubbed “Iraqi Freedom” and “Enduring Freedom”. According to U.S. Central Command, the number of American casualties resulting from these campaigns is 5461 until today. (A complete database of the fallen can be found at http://militarytimes.com/valor/).

Here is more about the history of Memorial Day.

Too often, we learn about military conflict as a collective narrative as told by statistics and numbers, and recorded in history books written and edited by those who emerged victoriously. But as Mark Twain did, I believe that it is more important to write about the stories of men, rather than about the story of mankind.

As a journalist, I am concerned that we are not doing enough to record the personal stories of those who were directly engaged and affected. We are in danger of losing these stories forever.

The number of living World War I veterans is now down to a handful of ancient people spread out over the world. Most of them are infirm. Whatever has not been recorded so far is now lost forever.

We still have a chance with World War II veterans. The U.S. once had 16 million of them. Today, there are only about 2.5 million left. Of those, 1,000 are dying every day, and this rate will accelerate sharply in the coming years.

We must keep in mind that the annual death rate for veterans is connected to the military rank they held at the time of their service. The reason is that military rank is usually associated with age and experience. Therefore, the higher a veteran’s military rank (and the higher his decision making powers and scope of experiences) were at the time of service, the older he would be today. This would place him in an age group with a higher death rate.

What this means for us as documentarians is that we are rapidly losing access to the decision makers, and that we will be limited to interviewing enlisted men and lower ranking veterans only. Unless we act quickly, their stories too will never be told again.

Several venerable organizations, such as the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress and National World War II Museum in New Orleans are trying hard to preserve the personal histories of veterans, but their efforts are a drop in the bucket.

I think private initiative is the key. Those of us who have family members or personal friends who served should do our very best to get them to write down or record their stories by electronic means.

We should become repositories and custodians of their experiences and memorabilia. Luckily, modern information technology makes all this much easier and cheaper. Almost anyone can now make digital video or audio recordings, and it is very easy to share these with the entire world.

I know from personal experience that it is often very difficult to get old veterans to talk about their wartime experience, particularly if they were full of losses and trauma. But there is too much to be lost not to try!