Despite what you might see in the advertisements, Memorial Day is not a particularly good occasion for a picnic, going out on the boat, or having a 15% off sale on bedroom furnishings – unless those are things you would normally do at a funeral.  

It is to honor the memory of those who died in service.  

It’s not Veterans Day, either, but it’s a good time to give a little thought to a certain variety of veteran, which might be reason to alter one of the day’s slogans. 

“All gave some, some gave all” is a fine sentiment, but the word “gave” implies that it was a donation, which was not the case for many who were drafted. More accurate might be “some WAS GOTTEN from all, whether they liked it or not.” 

I was one of those draftees. When people say, “thank you for your service,” I respond, “I appreciate you saying so, but it wasn’t my idea.” 

Sometimes I have to wonder whose idea it was and whether any judgment went into the decision at all. It is hard to imagine some general going to the president and saying, “What we need right now is a 135-pound, nearsighted hillbilly who has trouble with doing what he is told to do.” 

What might be the scariest thing about the state of our union at that time is that I was not the worst of the lot. In fact, somebody thought I looked enough like a leader to put me in charge of a group of draftees being sent off to Fort Polk, Louisiana.  

It was a surly group. Nobody had any intention of being ordered around by the likes of me or much of an inclination to get alongwith anybody else, and the day’s traveling was a learning experience. In addition to taking our first airplane ride, we were finding out that cultural diversity can be stressful. Much of the trip was spent glaring and mumbling insults, threats and racial slurs just loud enough to be known about but not sufficiently audible to call for mouth punching. 

The second airplane ride of our lives was on a 19-seat buckboard with wings, bouncing through a thunderstorm and sliding to a stop on a runway with no terminal. We were greeted by a man in rain poncho who called us more bad names in five minutes than we had called each other in a whole day of mumbling. The fact that we didn’t have rain ponchos did not hurry this guy up in the least.  

We were processed, the shorthand being “fed, bled and put to bed.”  An unhappy soldier threw a big bundle of bedding at each unhappy soldier-to-be and then led us off through the still thundering storm to a tin-roofed barn thing – our first barracks. 

We wrapped our drenched selves in our soggy bedding, listened to the rain hammer the roof and looked forward to things getting worse. You can see why some of us might have problems with the notion that we were “giving” what was being gotten out of us. 

It was not a donation, it was an obligation. Being sent for instead of showing up voluntarily doesn’t make those who did it any less proud of what they did, it’s just a special circumstance that doesn’t happen any more and ought to be remembered. 

Some of those who didn’t come back never wanted to go in the first place. They did it because it had to be done for everybody.  

Just something to think about while you’re out on your boat on Monday.