Memorial Day Remembrance

Memorial Day Weekend in 1991, I went on a camping trip with an old friend in the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia. It was going to be a quick trip and we decided to camp in a campground instead of backpacking in as we normally did. We got in late in the day Friday and as we pulled in we saw only one other pair of campers in the camp ground: a couple of older gents in their 70s.

After we set up camp we decided to stretch our legs and walk around the campground. We exchanged pleasantries with the old guys while admiring their set up. They had a barbecue grill going and big thick steaks cooking, veggies steaming in foil, and a cooler of beer. My buddy and I went back to our site and choked down our standard camping fare: canned stew and cheap whiskey.

The next day we went on a BIG hike. Typical of us: we hadn’t thought to bring a trail map and we ended up getting somewhat — okay totally — lost about 7 miles in. That’s when the skies opened up. It had been cloudy all day making it difficult to get our bearings. Now it rained so hard we could hardly see right in front of us. That’s also when I reached into my pocket and found a hole where the keys to my truck once were. My friend for some reason felt that this was my fault and exhibited displeasure.

Since we only had my truck and the Dolly Sods are a long way from anywhere not having keys to said truck was problematic. We thought we had made sort of a circuit and that the campground might not be very far away. However, we weren’t certain of this, and thought our only hope was to backtrack the 7 miles we’d already done in hopes of finding the keys along the way. That turned out to be one of our few good decisions. Not because we found the keys, those were gone. It was a good decision because we had in fact been walking in basically a straight line away from camp despite taking several different trails that we thought led us in a loop.

It was pitch dark when we got back to camp. We ate a soggy, silent dinner and climbed into our gently leaking tent.

The next morning our best strategy was to somehow break into the truck and hope against hope that I had an extra set of keys hidden away somewhere. That would have required thinking ahead to an extent that neither of us thought likely.

We went to visit the old gentlemen (Ed and Ray) to see if by any chance they had a hatchet with which we could break out a window. Of course they had a hatchet; they had everything!

I took the hatchet to the window in the extended cab. I was duly impressed by the fact that hitting the window with a hatchet as hard as I could several times did not so much as scratch the glass. It did however pop the latch, which, with the use of a coat hanger supplied by our new found friends, allowed us to unlock the door and get into the truck. Sadly, my foresight and planning were every bit as inept as we expected them to be. There were no spare keys.

Ray and Ed offered to drive us 45 minutes or so to town hoping to find a service station with a tow truck on a Sunday in West Virginia. This was incredibly kind of them. I rode with Ray to town while my buddy stayed behind with Ed.

Ray asked me about my work and how my friend and I got to know each other. He told me that he’d been a civil engineer before retiring a few years ago. I asked him how long he and Ed had known each other. “Oh, we’ve been camping together every Memorial Day for a long, long time.” He was quiet for a few moments and said: “We were in the Army together.” I did the math in my head and figured I’d take an educated guess: “Would that have been World War 2?” He nodded. I thanked him for his service to the country. After a few more moments he seemed to make a decision and opened up.

“We served in Europe after the Normandy Invasion. We were in the same platoon in Eastern Belgium. It was kind of dull, mostly, as we weren’t on the front lines, we were just doing mop up. Then one day all of a sudden we found ourselves on the front lines.”

“The German counter-attack caught us all off guard” (for history buffs this was the Battle of the Bulge). “They were everywhere and there was just our one platoon against them in this little village.”

At this point tears were streaming down his cheeks. Mine too. I thought about the trauma that would cause the “strong silent type” to tear up nearly 50 years after the events.

“Ed and I were the only two who survived that day.”

I said: “I think I’m probably supposed to say something like: ‘I understand what you must have endured,’ but the truth is: I don’t think I have any idea what you’ve been through.”

He patted my knee and said: “I pray that you never do.”

We found a mechanic with a tow truck and eventually my buddy and I were able to drive home. As soon as we were alone together my buddy turned to me and asked “Man, did you talk to Ray about how he and Ed met?!?” I said I had and we were silent for a long time.

As Memorial Day comes and goes each year I think back on Ray, Ed and the members of their platoon who never came home. I think about the stakes that need to be involved to justify those sacrifices. It is important that we honor those who lost their lives in service to the country on this day. It is also important that we hold our political leaders accountable for asking men and women to make that ultimate sacrifice. The price we ask them and their families to pay is unimaginable; the consequences to humanity of failing to fight have to be worth that cost.