Take time to honor the fallen

As we begin the Memorial Day weekend heralding the beginning of summer, let’s examine the story of Memorial Day and see how many of us really knew the following facts while we’re guzzling beer and firing up the barbecue.

Many Americans believe the Memorial Day commemoration is for the American military killed in the Great Wars and conflicts, but that’s not how it started.

About 125,000 of our boys — and they were indeed mostly boys 18-20 years of age — who died far away from home are buried overseas. They are honored by their country on Memorial Day, Armed Forces Day, and Veterans Day.

But did you know many of those far-away places also honor our military in gratitude and reverence for the sacrifices Americans made to free them from Nazi or Japanese control?

In the Netherlands alone, for instance, 8,300 headstones of Americans have been adopted by the Dutch as their own. Each grave has been adopted by a Dutch, German, or Belgian family or business and lovingly tended to with great honor from one generation to the next. The same is true in little French villages and forests, the English countryside and islands in the Pacific we couldn’t find on a map for money. All of these places honor the gallantry and bravery of American military members who died protecting them.

As beautiful and reassuring as this is, that’s not the origin of our Memorial Day.

It was actually the Civil War that spawned our Memorial Day – originally called Decoration Day – where more than 600,000 Americans died, mostly of famine and disease. 600,000 fellow Americans on our own soil. The Civil War claimed more lives than any other conflict we’ve ever been in. So many deaths that it required the establishment of America’s first national cemeteries.

It began as Decoration Day because the main purpose of the event was to decorate, or “honor,” the grave sites of the fallen which began shortly after the Civil War ended.

But here’s a secret only recently discovered by a history professor in 1996: the first Americans to decorate the graves of Civil War soldiers were freed black slaves in 1865. More than 10,000 people, mostly black with some missionaries sprinkled in, staged the first parade through a graveyard in Charleston, South Carolina after decorating the graves of the Union soldiers with flowers.