Live, love and mourn

LITTLE ROCK — After great pain a formal feeling comes-

The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs . . .

This is the hour of lead

Remembered if outlived,

As freezing persons recollect the snow-

First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

• Emily Dickinson

TWENTY YEARS after D-Day, sitting on the wall of an American military cemetery, the one on the bluff that overlooks Omaha Beach, where the tide had run blood red that day, the Supreme Allied Commander now sat quietly talking with an interviewer.

The chaos and confusion, piercing death and immense destruction, the whole not so organized disaster called war, were far behind him now, yet never far behind him. The man on whose starred shoulders the whole operation had fallen, and who had pre-written his letter taking full responsibility for the failure it might well have been, and almost was, looked back and could think only of the lost:

“These men came here,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “to storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom. . . . Many thousands of men have died for such ideals as these . . . but these young boys . . . were cut off in their prime.”

Report from the beach, June 6, 1944:

“By 0640 only one officer from A Company was alive, Lt. E. Ray Nance, and he had been hit in the heel and the belly. Every sergeant was either dead or wounded. One boat, when the ramp was dropped, every man in the thirty man assault team was killed before any of them could get out.”

Twenty years after D-Day, the old general’s thoughts, just as they had been on the morning of June 6, 1944, were still with the troops, the troops, the troops. No wonder they just called him Ike.

WE WHO quote his words now, sitting behind capacious desks in our own clean, air conditioned offices, and you who read them in the freedom and security of your home, may forget. We may forget that we can say what we please, read what we want, and look anybody in the world in the eye, only because, in a thousand places at a thousand times, from Lexington and Concord to the souks of Fallujah and sands of Kandahar, grimy young soldiers full of life were willing to sacrifice it for us.

Even today, even remembering, we may forget. After great pain comes . . . a three-day weekend. It’s the amnesiac American way. Give us a happy ending every time. Even the little American flags on the graves today have an almost festive air. Maybe that is as it should be in a much blessed land. Today is not just for eulogies and salutes but baseball games, car races, run-off elections and other sporting competitions. As was said long ago, there is a time for war and a time for peace, a time to weep and a time to laugh. Today is such a curiously mixed day.

But there are other days, seemingly ordinary, that suddenly, unexpectedly, become memorial days. And we are brought face to face with what has been sacrificed on our account. Visiting picturesque New Orleans one time, between the restaurants and walks around the French Quarter and strolls under the great oaks in Audubon Park, we went to one of the city’s old cemeteries-always an education. In any city.

In the early afternoon we walked down the rows of headstones that long ago had begun yielding their names to the elements. We went past the victims of the Yellow Fever epidemic, the monuments to those who died rich in years and honors, the graves of respectable citizens and of reprobates, of Dearly Beloved Mothers and that of a locally famous voodoo enchantress. . . .

And then we were stopped. By a little picket fence surrounding a cluster of those government-issue markers, all squeezed inside a little square of their own, as they had been on a little square of beach in Normandy, comrades still, in death as they had been in life.

What struck us was that every one of the white markers-there must have been a dozen-bore the same date of death: June 6, 1944.

D-Day.

Whatever day we were visiting that cemetery, it suddenly became Memorial Day for us. That moment we did not forget. Have never been able to forget. The bright sun. The tired feeling of a tourist in a tired city. The shock of recognition. Why, these were still just boys! And beyond them, across time and history, there had been so many more like them. And in The American Tragedy (1861-65), the dead on both sides had been American. How describe the feeling, the moment of revelation, even rededication?

ERNIE PYLE did. The byline Ernie Pyle is no longer familiar to newspaper readers, though there was a time when the whole country read him with a daily avidity, a starving hunger for news, real news, in a real voice, An American voice. Ernie-it is hard even at this remove not to call him by his first name-was a different kind of war correspondent, not one of those experts standing in front of a map in a television studio and talking Tactics and Strategy so knowingly, so awfully knowingly.

Ernie Pyle was different. He was there. On the ground. In the air. At sea. Ever with Our Boys wherever they went. Like so many of those he wrote about, he would be cut down-in his case on April 18, 1945, by sniper fire on a little island not far from Okinawa. He was in the midst of a column when it happened. They found it in his pocket, and here is what he said in the last words of his last, unfinished column:

“Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.

“But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead men by mass production-in one country after another-month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference. . . .”

Ernie Pyle couldn’t forget. We shouldn’t. And, we swear again, we never will.