Memorial Day 2022

BBC reporter Jeremy Bowen is covering the war in Ukraine. He has written a couple of pieces in the past three months about Maxsym Lutsyk, a 19-year-old who put his university education on hold to fight the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In March he wrote of Maxsym and his friends. “Witnessing 18- and 19-year-olds, full of the invincible sense that young men have, going to war in Europe, just as they had during the blood-soaked years of the 20th Century was moving, depressing, and alarming. It was a sign of the big war that was coming.”

He wrote about how young Ukrainians were adapting, the way human beings always do in war. After the first shock old lives and routines fade into a new, all-consuming version of real life. Their lives, along with those of every Ukrainian, were turned upside down, when the Russians invaded in February. In his latest installment, Bowen asks Maxsym how his life has changed.

“Even now I can’t answer you exactly because it is very hard to understand that some of your friends, they died in your arms. It is hard to live with that fact . . . and when we left Rubizhne, it was hard for us to understand that we have lost the battle for this factory; for one of the key cities of Luhansk region.”

War changes the lives of its participants forever. The story of one student turned into a frontline soldier is a window into the dramatic changes that have come to a country and to the entire world. Maxsym now has a strong sense of the meaning of his life and his mission: “We are fighting for the freedom of the entire world, the entire civilized world and if anything thinks it is a Ukrainian-Russian war, it isn’t. It is the war of the light and the darkness between Russia and the entire world.”

Young men and women have found their purpose in battle for generations - for centuries. It is not pretty. It is terrible and dark and filled with bloody injuries and death. Witnessing the death of friends demands that some meaning be found in the loss and grief.

In the nineteenth century, as the United States emerged from the terror, devastation, and death of a bitter and bloody Civil War, those whose lives had been changed forever by the war sought ways to learn to live with the grief of the loss. On soil literally hallowed by the blood of those who died in the war, the tradition of Memorial Day emerged. People had mourned their dead since time immemorial, but there was somehow a new quality to the decoration of the graves of the war dead. The cost of the war seemed unbearably high. The death was too much. They vowed to never forget those who had died.

In my early teen years, I played taps for our community’s Memorial Day observance. The simple sounds rang out and echoed off of the simple white granite markers in our town cemetery marking the final resting places of those who had fought in World War I and World War II. I saw first hand the tears on the cheeks of the old men who had marched in the simple parade in our town. But I was young. I did not understand what they had seen. The war of my generation, Vietnam, was far away. The reasons for the war and the aims of our nation were unclear.

One day when I was 15, I once again played taps in that cemetery. This time the occasion was the funeral of a young man just four years older than I who died in Vietnam. His earthly remains were shipped back on a military plane in a casket provided by the US Army. I saw the tears on his mother’s and father’s faces. I began to understand the terrible cost of war. I began to understand how important it is to never forget that cost.

The sound of taps and Memorial Day are linked forever in my memory. They stir deep within my soul. I do not know how many more wars it will take for the leaders of this world to understand that the cost is far higher than any imagined benefits of war. But I do know that one of the ways we humans deal with the incredible burden of grief is to remember. It is because we need to remember that Memorial Day is important.

I don’t know if Maxsym will survive his war. Frankly the odds are not good. But I pray that he will live to one day have the luxury of peace to grieve the losses he has experienced. I hope that he will have days of quiet remembrance when tears come to his eyes at the memory of friends who have died. He cannot afford the emotional cost of full release of his grief now in the midst of the fighting. It will go unprocessed until his life grants him peace and rest. If he survives, he will create his own opportunities for remembrance. It might not be a formal holiday with a name like Memorial Day, but it will be, for him and his friends a day of remembrance. If they survive they will need to remember those who did not.

A few years ago I played taps in church on a Memorial Day weekend. I knew where to look in my congregation for the tears on the cheeks. For them the simple song was a release. It was also a reminder that they were not the only ones who remembered.

One human life is precious beyond compare. The carnage of war is a cost that is incalculable. And yet the leaders of this world somehow still imagine that war is something that can be won. They do not count the cost because counting the cost is impossible. Memorial Day reminds us that even when the leaders declare victory, the losses are real and tragic. We will not forget. The world will not forget.


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