This Monday is Memorial Day and while we are all soldiers right now in a war on us by a death-dealing dictator, we take this weekend and Monday to salute and thank those heroic American who lost their lives in the service of our nation and protecting us and the country we have to fight for today.
Songs for this weekend include songs about war and protest but also songs about life, being remembered, noble, and loved.
Now it’s your turn to offer a musical tribute to those who have lost their lives in the pursuit of protecting the lives of others. Happy Memorial Day Weekend!
I know it is near impossible to feel sorry for Germans in WWII, but I do. I wonder what I would have done. Not been SS or anything like that, but, if you knew my real name, – my German side was here before WWI, but still. We were American. We dropped the German language on that side. We integrated out of fear for being un-American. As such, I do have sympathy not for the Nazis, but for every conscript. It’s difficult, and those that have known me also know I have a Southern Scots-Irish Confederate history. Yeah, every day I don’t wake up and blow my brains out is a good day. I can’t divorce myself from my heritage though. All I can do, is excise the bad parts. In both wars, they lost – and I’m glad. But, I’m sorry, not everybody had a choice – especially in Nazi Germany.
My name would make me Scots-Irish, but my family’s oral tradition is that my ancestors came from Northern Ireland. They were isolationists, as I pretty much am, and did not participate in the Civil War. They lived: “down South,” in a place so remote that it was said that it, “wasn’t the end of the world, but you could see it from there.”
My dad was a soldier, and a career officer. We lived in Germany during the USAFE years (and, “yes,” we took home sets of fine Bavarian china, at pennies on the penny.) I spoke German that I learned from the locals; and for some strange reason, I loved Germany. My dad was an inveterate sightseer and we poked around every corner of the country, from the fairy-like castles perched high above the Rhine, to Constantine’s magnificent hall, to the battlefields where my father fought the German Army. He was Airborne, so his missions were always thirty miles out in front of Patton’s 3rd. That wasn’t long after the war, but Daddy never spoke of their actual assignments. They would never say anything except, “I did my job.” I was told that before the war inflation was so high that you needed a wheelbarrow full of money to buy dinner- and that might be nothing except a loaf and a jug. Germany had been tortured after the First World War. Unconscionably and mercilessly.
I can’t muster sympathy for nazis, but I have always felt sorry for the German people. They didn’t hang their heads, or complain. But they spoke with bitterness about Dresden, and the other fire-bombings that were a culture war. The last job that I ever did professionally was working with a team of German engineers in Basil, a city that is about one-third German. We went on beer tasting hikes, their national pride. They are so proud, still. But, I like Belgian beer better, with its smooth red pilsch, than German lagers and Weiss.I remember when the Wall was smashed down with sledges, and jacks. Nothing was sure in the first hours, and I didn’t sleep for two days.
For my Uncle James (Dad’s brother), buried in Aras, France, recipient of The Croix de Goerre from the French Government, in WWI.
For my Cousins in the U.S. Army who served in France and North Africa in WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croix_de_Guerre
My grandpa was in the Normandy campaign, as a driver and mechanic. I’ll find photos before Monday, but he never talked about it. Not to my dad, not to anybody.
Also… ‘Eid Mubarak!
An anti-war song, believe me.
https://time.com/3834792/serj-tankian-armenian-genocide/