Reflections for a Meaningful Memorial Day
As we approach Memorial Day weekend, we collectively pause to remember our Nation’s war dead, briefly putting aside thoughts of the current pandemic to reflect on those who died while fighting our country’s wars. All told, in our two hundred and forty-three-year history, America has engaged in some seventy-nine distinct conflicts, campaigns, and wars, culminating in nearly 1.4 million individuals who died in service to our country. Some of these fell on American soil (e.g. American Revolutionary War, the Indian Wars, the Civil War); some fell off our coasts (e.g. the Barbary War and other actions against pirates); some fell along our borders (e.g. the Mexican-American War); and some fell in places very far away — places many of them might have had difficulty identifying on a map before being sent there. In some conflicts, the number of American casualties was staggering; consider 750,000 U.S. and Confederate dead in the Civil War, or 405,399 American dead in World War Two. In some conflicts, such as the war in Vietnam, the number of deaths, while an order of magnitude less (i.e. 58,209), was no less scarring on the American psyche. Still, in many more conflicts, the number of American dead was in the hundreds, tens or twenties, or even as few as one. In large scale conflicts, parents and wives dreaded the prospect of a telegram or a knock at the door informing them that their loved one had died, and nary a single household was unaffected. Still, in other, smaller-scale operations and campaigns, perhaps only a handful of families were affected, families such as that of Staff Sgt. John E. Suponcic, 26, of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, an Army Special Forces Soldier and sole U.S. combat casualty, who was killed in eastern Kosovo in 1999 when a vehicle in which he was riding struck a land mine.
Many of those who fell in defense of our country died heroically — men such as Medal of Honor winner Captain Benjamin L. Salomon, a dentist serving as the surgeon for the 2nd Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division during the Battle of Saipan. While working feverishly to tend to approximately 30 casualties brought to his aid station during the first minutes of the battle, CPT Salomon found himself using machine gun, rifle, bayonet, and fists to fend off Japanese soldiers who had swarmed through the tent’s entrance and crawled under its walls. When CPT Salomon’s body was later found, 98 dead enemy soldiers were piled in front of his position. However, not all war deaths were as heroic. For every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, and Coast-guardsman who died in combat, an equal if not greater number died from non-battle injuries such as accidents and disease. Consider, for example, that for every three men killed in combat during America’s Civil War from 1861 to 1865, another five died of disease. Similarly, of 116,516 U.S. casualties in World War One, 63,114 were classified as Disease Non-Battle Injury; and in World War Two, 60,000 U.S. troops died in Africa and the South Pacific from malaria alone. Yet regardless of the way these men died, each of their deaths represents a life story cut short, as well as grieving parents, spouses, or children who were left behind to mourn for them.
In 1925, journalist and satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote in a German newspaper: “Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!”; translated to mean: “The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!” So herein lies the challenge of appropriately observing Memorial Day: recognizing that each one of these hundreds of thousands of war dead was not simply a statistic, but an individual. Some were petty, some magnanimous; some were talkative, some taciturn; some were silly, and some were stern. They came from cities, towns, and farms and represented the myriad religious, ethnic, and cultural identities that comprise American society. Yet despite their diverse backgrounds, they all had one thing in common: They died in service to this country, too young, and far away from home; and with each of their deaths, families and hometowns grieved.
In my hometown of Enfield, Connecticut (then called Thompsonville, Connecticut), some of my earliest boyhood memories are of sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, watching Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather on our family’s black and white Zenith television reporting on the war in Southeast Asia, with the ubiquitous Huey helicopters hovering behind them inserting Soldiers into the rice paddies of Vietnam; and I also recall on Sundays my parents reading the list of names published by the Hartford Courant of the servicemen who were killed in action that week. Although I was too young at the time to fully understand the reasons for the war, I was old enough to appreciate what that list represented: young men, some barely out of high school, dying violently and far from their homes and families. Among these was twenty-two-year-old SP4 Angelo Joseph Sferrazza, Thompsonville’s first Vietnam casualty, a door gunner with the 121st AHC, 13th CAB, killed along with three other Soldiers on 11 July 1966, when his helicopter was shot down over Soc Trang Province, South Vietnam. Services were held at the Leete Funeral Home and Saint Patrick’s Church, and Angelo was buried in the King Street Cemetery. The town named a small park after Angelo, down by the Connecticut river, where it sweeps around Kings Island. According to one review “(It’s) a nice place to watch the sunset and feed some ducks”.
In contrast to the national euphoria following the end of World War Two, the end of the Vietnam war in 1975 was met with a kind of melancholic relief. Nonetheless, within five years after the end of the war, America was again involved in low intensity conflicts in places like El Salvador, followed by Beirut, Grenada, Libya, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo; and in each of these places, young Americans died, and back home, their families grieved, and more parks were dedicated. Sometimes several hundred young men were killed (e.g. Beirut), sometimes “only” one (e.g. SSG Suponcic in Kosovo).
Our most recent conflict, “The War on Terror”, has been fought by young men (and now young women as well) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa, with more than 7,000 fatalities as of January 2020. As a battalion surgeon deployed to Iraq in 2005–2006 and Afghanistan in 2010, I knew (even if briefly) some of these young men. There were some whose names I never learned, like the Soldier incinerated by an Improvised Explosive Device, whose charred body, along with that of his military working dog, were brought to my Troop Medical Clinic and solemnly placed on the ground next to each other; or the Soldier decapitated by a rocket propelled grenade while standing in the hatch of his vehicle during a mounted patrol, whose body was brought by his shaken comrades to my clinic. Sometimes, I did learn their names and conversed with them before they died, like the young Marine with grievous head and neck injuries whom I stabilized with a tracheotomy and chest tube, and who lived long enough to make the MEDEVAC helicopter to the Ibn Sina Hospital, but who died in the operating room later that day. At one point, I considered contacting his family to tell them of his last day, but I thought better of it. After all, what purpose would it serve? What would be accomplished by telling his parents that their son’s last words to me were: “I can’t breathe.”?
I’ve many more similar memories, like doing chest compressions in the back of an armored personnel carrier in the middle of the night while transporting a dying man to Ibn Sina, only to realize that he died along the way. At some point, however, I question if recounting these anecdotes becomes more about the story or the storyteller than about the dead Soldier or Marine, and that is not my intent. What is my intent is to remind people of the obvious: that each war casualty represents a real person — someone’s child, sibling, or parent. For those of you who have deployed downrange, or for those of you who have lost a loved one to war, you need not be reminded. For everyone else, I humbly suggest that this Memorial Day, rather than contemplating the large number of people who have died in service to this country, identify one from any of our nation’s past or present conflicts, and learn a little bit about that person.
I agree with the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill that “war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things”, and sometimes it is indeed necessary to go to war. However, by being ever mindful that when we choose to go to war, we are in fact consigning young people to die, we will, I pray, only do so with the utmost reluctance.
I wish you all a meaningful Memorial Day.
Michael Zapor, MD, PhD
Colonel, US Army (Retired)
