Saturday, May 23, 2009

Memorial Day Coverfolk: Soldier Songs
for the next generation, and those gone by





For most of my life, the military has been an abstraction. Though war itself lives everpresent in our newsdriven culture, and memorial statues and parades a recurring part of community, my concept of life in the armed forces, and the risks and stresses thereof, is based on popculture parables, mostly: fictionalized movie and television portrayals fleshed out by fleeting glimpses of men and women in uniform in airports, reporting to places I cannot imagine, to carry out tasks I could not describe.

My connection with family members who have served has been long after the fact. My father spent some portion of the sixties as a clerk typist in the Coast Guard reserves, but other than a truly dorky picture which he kept in his bedside drawer, and a few well-worn tales of short-haired inspection wigs and furloughs which I have evoked over the years, I could not identify those parts of him, if any, which were forged in service to his country.

Similarly, though my grandfather’s work developing radar in the Army is an important part of the family mythos, it was long over by the time I came to consciousness. Though I carry his dog tag in my wallet, the man I knew as Grandpa was a quiet shirtsleeved man, his service so much a part of who he had become that I never really considered how his military past had made him until it was too late to ask.

Surely, both of these men, and the usual assortment of greatuncles, met men along the way who never came back. But their stories are not mine. Their losses, if any, are their own. And so, for most of my life, Memorial Day has been a secular holiday, atheistic, with no trace of sentiment.


But teaching in a school with an ROTC program means living with a daily reminder of the armed forces as peopled by real, three-dimensional human beings. Students show up in class crisp and confident in uniform; I pass them in the hallways lined up for inspection, or pacing out their cadences.

Jerome and Lori Anna, my two graduating ROTC seniors, are still just kids, off to Prom on Thursday, on the cusp of graduation. Their lives are ahead of them, but their choices are limited. For them, service is a way out of the inner city, perhaps the only one available to them. It will pay for college, and help them focus their abilities. It will give them a future.

And so they choose to lend their bodies and hearts to the protection of our shores and skies. And their very real and present future — fighting wars, combatting terrorism — lends new credence to the need for memory.

May they serve proud, like our fathers before us, and our grandfathers before them. May their service be swift, and their burden light. Rest assured; we will remember them.

Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features every Sunday and Wednesday. Coming soon: a rundown of coverage from this year’s folk festivals, and a long-overdue look at some recent and upcoming releases.

Category: Uncategorized

4 Responses to “Memorial Day Coverfolk: Soldier Songs
for the next generation, and those gone by”

  1. Zach Maxwell
    May 24th, 2009 at 10:38 am

    I appreciate the sentimentality of this post…as my relationship to the armed forces has been very similar. Always provacative.
  2. michiganDAN
    May 30th, 2009 at 8:24 am

    amen
  3. Schoolday Coverfolk, Take 2: A revisited post in recognition of teachers and learners — Cover Lay Down
    November 11th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

    [...] countries in other, more dangerous ways are encouraged to head back in time for a still-live set of Soldier Songs, just as relevant on Veterans Day as it was on Memorial Day. In my other life, I’m a teacher in [...]
  4. bubba
    January 2nd, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    Another great soldier song, missing in this blog post: “Soldier’s Joy, 1864″ by Guy Clark, from his excellent 2002 album “The Dark”. Highly recommended.

Leave a Reply