Memorial Day 2025

I always observe Memorial Day, being a veteran myself, from a family full of military veteranss.

This year will be a bit unconventional since the normal time designated – later morning – will be occupied by a visit to a friend who recently had heart surgery.  So I’ll miss the Veterans for Peace observance at the Veterans Service Building at the State Capitol Mall (9:30 a.m.) and an alternative I planned also to possibly attend, at the Woodbury City Hall area about the same time.

I choose, this year, to remember two memorable Memorial Days, in 1946 and 2014.

Sykeston High School ca late winter or early Spring 1946, most likely photograph taken by my Dad, Henry Bernard.

At Memorial Day, 1946, I had just turned 6 years old: old enough to remember stuff; not old enough to attach significance to what I was witnessing.

The family had just moved to the tiny town of Sykeston ND, where my Dad had, the previous September, become the Superintendent of the public school.  He had moved earlier than the rest of us – Mom and four kids, me, the oldest, the youngest born in mid-November, 1945.  At Sykeston, we lived in a rented small house just to the left of the above photo of the school.

That Memorial Day, I remember as a pleasant spring day.  I was standing more or less where the above photograph was taken.  There were people on the lawn, but mostly I remember the few men who simultaneously shot rifles into the air a few times.  It was a somber time – even a kid could feel that.

The experience stuck in my mind.  It was not until years later that I connected the dots of that day immediately after WWII.

Dad’s brother had died on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, one of the first American casualties of WWII.  One of Dad’s colleague teachers was his brother-in-law George Busch, who had spent three full years as a Naval officer on the destroyer USS Woodworth (DD 460) in the Pacific Theatre.  George’s wife, Jean, filled in for him the first months of the school year, as his tour of duty didn’t end until late October when the Woodworth, which docked at Tokyo in mid-September, 1945, docked at Portland, Oregon.  Doubtless Uncle George and Dad had something to do with the observance I was witnessing.  Doubtless some residents of the town had been casualties.  Likely there were a few crosses on the lawn, which I don’t remember.

More than 50 years after 1946 – it was 1998 in San Francisco – I learned about another family story of the horrors of war.  I had a cousin, Marie-Josephine, two months younger than me, who was born in the Philippines.  She was the namesake of Dad’s mother and my grandma Josephine.  On a summer day in San Francisco in 1998, her brother, a couple of years older, told the story of the liberation of Manila in the late winter of 1945.  The family, mother and three children, took refuge in a churchyard, and in the ensuing chaos, shrapnel from somebodies shell hit Marie-Josephine, killing her instantly.  She was in her mother’s arms.  Her brother, Alfred, was also there, and he broke down as he told the story of his sisters death.  Such is how it is with memory.  (Their Dad had spent most of the war imprisoned in Santo Tomas POW camp in Manila.)

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Fast forward to Memorial Day, 2014, at the Veterans for Peace observance on the State Capitol grounds in St. Paul.

On that day I was with two Pakistani men who were Fulbright scholars through the Human Rights Center of the University of Minnesota Law School.  One of them had decided on a final project that involved interviewing at least 10 persons involved in peace-making, and I was asked to be the supervisor of the project, which went very well.

On Memorial Day they joined me at the observance and had the opportunity to interview the guest speaker for the day, Jim Northrop, noted Ojibway author.  Their film of that observance, including Northrops comments, remains available online.  Be sure to read the preliminary paragraph, then scroll down to Veterans for Peace.

Peace is complicated, as is obvious particularly now, Without peace there is no future, and hats off to all of those who labor on,.

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A moving story: Heather Cox Richardson May 25, 2025.