DR. JACK R. VAN ENS, AUTHOR

CREATIVE GROWTH INC.

9745 W. 77 TH DRIVE

ARVADA, CO 80005

TEL. 303-420-7416

E-mail: vanensfam@juno.com

Web site: www.thelivinghistory.com

HONOR THE DEAD WHO FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM

Death stalked me the past two Memorial Days. It looked me in the eye. I couldn't deflect its stare. I faced death and didn't run away from it.

My bucket list of travels to pursue before my final rest included observing Memorial Day in Washington, DC, which my wife and I achieved two years ago. Milling with patriotic crowds on the Mall, we visited the imposing World War II Memorial. Dressed in military uniforms worn from the Revolutionary War through the First Gulf War, soldiers honored past comrades. Standing smartly at attention, these sentinels in period military costumes helped us face death as we honored the over 400,000 who fell in combat in WWII.

No one ought to visit the World War II Memorial without pausing at the Memorial Registry. Its database is open to those who visit the Web site: www.wwiimemorial.com.

Listed are those killed or missing in action. Not all World War II veterans are in the registry. You can show your honor by registering relatives who fought for freedom.

Then we followed a motley dressed Honor Guard of veterans who held high Old Glory as they processed to the Vietnam Memorial. They wore sweat-stained bandanas, tie-died shirts, and faded jeans. These sons of the turbulent 1960s attired themselves in frayed clothes, indicative of our turbulent society in the 1960s divided over the Vietnam War. Etched in ebony marble are names of my second cousin, John Dekker, and a high school chum, Ron Vandenberg. We honored their memory, as taps blew across the Mall.

Facing death head-on, Time Magazine's commentator Nancy Gibbs wrote a poignant tribute (May 5, 2008, p. 56) to her late father, Howard Gibbs (1919-2002). She lamented how our society ducks death and thereby shows little honor to it. "There are those-soldiers and nurses, poets and priests-for whom death is a sure companion. But most of us treat it as a notorious celebrity we watch from afar, fascinated but removed, until we have no choice, preferring myth to truth."

"Do we raise the odds of dying well," asks Gibbs, "if we pitch our tents within sight of the cemetery, feel the cold earth and vow to make a bucket list, make resolutions, make amends?"

The Bush Administration denies our citizens its honorable duty to face death in war. Those who favor the war in Iraq order us to strike our tents and move far from feeling death's effects. They want us to invest in an antiseptic war, where carnage isn't viewed close-up. When flag draped coffins arrive at Andrews Airforce base, they are hidden from public view, lest newspapers print pictures of them. It's bad for the national psyche to dwell on death, we are told.

We don't honor the dead, do we, by pretending that they don't come home in shrouds? To avoid death is to dishonor it.

Last year, my wife and I visited the American Cemetery in Normandy, France, prior to Memorial Day. This graveyard on high cliffs filled with marble crosses overlooks what once was a shore of devastation-Omaha Beach. On D-Day the sea ran red with the blood of America soldiers who hit the narrow beaches and faced German artillery mowing them down from heights above. But our troops didn't flee. They fought on.

Visitors walk and talk in this cemetery but in hushed tones. It is holy ground. We honor the dead by caressing them in the shadows of our awareness, in crevices memory provides, and in landscapes of shattered dreams death wrecked on D-Day. Rain pelted us as we strolled among the graves. Raw winds whistled through those silent marble sentinels death posted. The day we visited the American Cemetery the weather furiously churned. It reflected beach assaults made by both the courageous many who died and the surviving troops who, after the war, vowed never to forget their fallen buddies.

In the village of Bayeau located in the thick of the D-Day battlefields, we stopped for dinner at a café below the great cathedral. A sign in the window read: WEWELCOME THE LIBERATORS. 1944 is so many years past. But these French people remember as they daily revisit the battles.

Officiating at graveside services to inter the remains of veterans who have fought the good fight and now enter their heavenly celebration, I pray, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth. 'Blessed indeed,' says the Spirit, 'that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them'" ( Revelation 14:13). When we revere the dead, their bodies lie in graves, but their labors live when we honor them.

In another era, education stressed memorization. Students committed to memory the rolling cadences from the King James Version of the Bible. Even the most humble intellect recited Shakespeare's poetry and rehearsed Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." He poses whether our memorials of the dead recapture their vitality and do justice to the noblest of their resolves.

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honor's voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?