Auxilary Bishop of St Paul and Minneapolis, Joseph Charron, once shared a story about the military burial of a war veteran. He said that the area around the gravesite was wet and slippery because it had rained the night before. As the American Legion Honor Guard raised their rifles and fired off a volley of gun fire in honor of the dead veteran, the mother of the dead soldier, slipped in the mud and fell. The grandson of the fallen woman cried out, “My God! They shot Grandma!”
I honor and respect the great sacrifice of all men and women who have served in the armed forces of the United States, many suffering death in combat, and, as equally, many suffering horrific physical and psychological wounds from their experience in combat that scars them and plagues them for the rest of their lives. I cannot begin to imagine the horror they have seen, and the demands that combat placed on them, morally and emotionally, that changed their lives forever. I have seen many of these men in the parish homeless shelter of St Stephen’s Catholic Church in South Minneapolis, so scarred from their combat experiences that they could never again slip into the normal pattern of civilian life following their service in the armed forces. The psychological damage being so great for them, that they turned to self-medicating with alcohol and street drugs in a desperate attempt to shut off the memories of war.
Homeless War Veterans
On this Veterans Day, 2021, I am thinking of those men who were coming into the parish homeless shelter at St Stephen’s during the time of my assignment at the parish. In many ways, the homeless shelter at St Stephen’s was a living memorial to war veterans, many of whom had been irreparably harmed by combat. At that time, many of these men were the casualties of the Vietnam War. As I was reassigned to another parish by the Archbishop, the first number of those who fought in the 1st Gulf War started to trickle into the homeless shelter. I am sure, that number has been swelled tremendously by those who suffer incurable mental injuries from both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
Are the Ways We Honor our War Dead and Combat Veterans Appropriate?
In Memorial Park of New Prague, they have just finished putting up another big memorial honoring those who have served in our armed forces. In every town in the United States, on the grounds of every park, every capital throughout the United States we will find numerous memorials to those who fought and died in our armed forces. Every park has decommissioned weapons of war, cannons, helicopter warships, and so on, that killed and tore apart the bodies of human beings, soldiers and civilians alike.
What I find it so ironic is that the very weapons which killed, horrifically maimed, and psychologically damaged our veterans, are used symbolically to honor them. The rifles that fired off the volley of shots at every military burial, are replicas of the very weapons that have killed thousands, millions of the bodies of our veterans buried in our church, civil, and national cemeteries. The cannons that litter our parks, once used in war, are just replicas of the explosive rain of shrapnel that killed and maimed many of those we honor on this day.
I wonder if the very symbols by which we attempt to honor our veterans, in truth, really dishonors the sacrifice that they made, and, ironically, glorifies the warfare that destroyed their lives.
Building Memorials That Truly Honor and Respect our Veterans
I think the most powerful memorials to our war veterans, are not the statues of warriors on horseback, nor the lifting of the flag on Iwo Jima which glorify combat. Rather, the most powerful memorials to our war veterans that speak viscerally to people are memorials like the Vietnam War Memorial in whose inscribed names of the fallen men and women of that war speaks not only of the great sacrifice they made, but the reality of the horror and folly of warfare.
To truly honor those who have been killed and maimed physically and mentally by warfare, the time has come to rid our parks of weapons of mass destruction, e.g. cannons, and melt them down into farm implements. To quote Isaiah 2:4b and c: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.” (NAB) Rather than the honor guard firing off a volley of shots, far better to leave the rifles unloaded and silenced in their pickup trucks. The haunting melody of taps, blown on a bugle, alone expresses volumes of the honor, the sacrifice, and the grief at the death of a veteran, especially a veteran of war.
What Would Jesus Do?
Throughout the Gospels, never does Jesus speak honorably of warfare and violence. In fact, he is quite explicit against it, so much so, that at the very time of his arrest, subsequent torture and execution, he reprimands Peter for cutting off the ear of one of the men arresting him, saying, “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”
Perhaps, the best way to honor the lives, and sacrifice of the lives of our veterans, is to erect memorials to honor those who work for peace as expressed by Jesus in the Beatitudes.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.” (Matthew 5:3-12, NAB)
