Memorial Day (05.26.22)

The war I grew up with, the Vietnam War, is history now and its events sometimes look like what you see when you accidentally put  binoculars up backwards to your eyes. Instead of bringing things close, you see a small image in the distance. If you’re lucky.

My mother’s friend Mary Carol Lemon (they were regular lunch companions when lunching was a deep female connection) was not lucky in that way. Her son Jeff, who grew up in my hometown, was a Vietnam-era pilot. He and his crew disappeared over Laos on April 25, 1971. The weather conditions were clear with no moon when Captain Lemon and his colleague fell out of the sky into what was described as heavy jungle, and out of the world, at least this world. Search-and-rescue was attempted. No trace was ever found.

 Jeff’s mother refused to settle, ever, with the utter and black oblivion into which her son went. She flew a POW/MIA (prisoner-of-war/missing-in-action) flag for the rest of her life. She wrote, she spoke, she met, she at least once chained herself to a government office door. She had memorial bracelets made – they were not uncommon in those days – and gave one to my mother, who gave it to me. I wore it in college and after.

I’ve written a little about Jeff Lemon over the years, finding and tracing his name decades later on the Vietnam Wall in DC, chaperoning a seventh-grade class, explaining who he’d been, and that each name on The Wall meant a story, and they were American stories, specific, painful and real.  

I think about all this on Memorial Day, and try to turn those binoculars around to bring his story into my immediate gaze. Moments from the past can be like beads on a string, separate but connected, fingered smooth to the touch. A boy in high school, a man taking off, a man shot down, a mother chaining herself to a door. I think of my mother and Mary Carol at a well-set lunch table, looking at the bracelets on their wrists as the waiter pours water. And young me wearing that same bracelet in college, and older me at The Wall trying to talk to young teens about the American story. On many Memorial Days, I attend a cemetery ceremony wherever I am. The flag enters with an honor guard; there are speeches, many speeches, and often some high school trumpeter clearing his throat to begin Taps. People hold still, listening. The music echoes in the trees. It echoes all the way back. And, because the supply of the dead is always replenished, it echoes all the way forward.