Memorial Day – “My country, right or wrong!”

[Part four of a series, TOMAHAWKS TO TALIBAN-HUNTERS, about S.C.’s unique military heritage and tradition]

By W. Thomas Smith Jr.

BURIED BENEATH A STRETCH OF GROUND ON A RIDGE ABOVE THE BROAD RIVER here in Columbia, S.C., are the remains of some 140 Confederate soldiers. Though some are in unmarked graves, most are beneath neat rows of small, white tombstones. At the entrance to this relatively small section of the much larger Elmwood Cemetery is a large, wrought-iron archway that simply says, Confederate Soldiers 1861-1865.

Nearby are 10 Union Army graves — at least eight of them being soldiers of the U.S. 8th Infantry Regiment — who died during the postwar occupation of Columbia.

The Union and Confederate graves are separated by an old stone wall — the wall itself something of an unofficial monument, built to divide, thus symbolizing the simmering distrust that existed between the two regions of the country for decades after the war ended in 1865.

Beyond these two sets of graves are interred thousands of other soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines (including many more Civil War veterans and countless descendents of those Civil War veterans) from different times and future wars.

My father, a Korean War veteran, is one of them.

Point being: no matter what flags Americans have served under — or causes they have fought for — since initially choosing between the colonies and the crown back in 1775, all are indeed Americans.

And most of them have fought less over the politics of a given conflict and more from the sheer fact that they were the ones responsible for defending the homeland or its interests abroad when politics and diplomacy had broken down.

One of the oft-told stories of the American Civil War is one in which a U.S. Army officer asks a young, newly captured Confederate soldier if he (the Confederate) owned slaves. When the prisoner said no, the officer asked why he was fighting on the side of the rebellion.

The Confederate matter-of-factly responded, Because you’re here.

Sounds simple, but for the Confederate soldier, taking up arms against the enemy had nothing really to do with politics or such lofty mid-19th-century issues as slavery and its abolition. It had everything to do with the fact that his country had been attacked. And if his fellow countrymen were going to shoulder weapons and march against the enemy, how could he not?

After all, as U.S. Navy Commodore Stephen Decatur said in 1815, nearly a half-century before the Civil War: Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!

This month, we remember those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, who — all politics aside — have left us. We’ve done so since the end of our Civil War, when annual observances began cropping up in communities across the nation. The earliest observances specifically honored those Civil War soldiers, sailors, and Marines who were killed in action or, just as likely, died of wounds or disease (most of those buried here on the ridge over the Broad River died in the nearby Confederate hospital).

Today, Memorial Day is a congressionally mandated national holiday.

Arlington National Cemetery holds the largest of our nation’s annual Memorial Day services. There, flags are placed at each of the nearly 300,000 graves. Speeches are made. And a wreath is placed at the Tomb of the Unknowns (also called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier).

As for me, I’ll do what I’ve done on previous Memorial Days: I’ll spend part of the morning strolling among the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers on this ridge here above the Broad River. I’ll think about their efforts. I’ll consider how much they struggled on both sides. I’ll try to imagine what it must have looked like from this very ridge-top on that single night in February 1865 as my city burned, the Confederacy collapsed around my great, great grandparents, and what would become the world’s most powerful nation for good was saved by those who were willing to risk death to save it.

– Visit W. Thomas Smith Jr. at http://uswriter.com.