Dak To

Memorial Day...

As a kid, it meant visiting the grandparents in the graveyard and attending a military parade that snaked it's way through the now extinct business district of downtown Pawtucket. The area was a mixed used area you'd see in many towns in 50's America. Dentist offices, insurance, banks, men's clothiers and drug stores that once sold cheeseburgers as well. The parade lasted perhaps 45 minutes with the usual military ooompah bands, various Veterans of Foreign Wars outfits and some politicians who practically knew everyone's name in the crowd. The most striking memory I have of one, were the M-14 salutes the soldiers would fire on occasion. Those were just blanks and were loud enough to startle you even though you knew it was coming. Add to that the strange clattering of spent brass cartridges that spun upon the pavement.

All that was of downtown is gone. It's been replaced by seemingly Soviet-styled block buildings that house God Knows What. If not that, it's Section 8 housing for the elderly, mental cases sedated to a safe and sound level or recently released ACI prisoners on their way to freedom via the halfway house, which rises 15 stories above the cityscape.

Downtown Pawtucket no longer looks like Eisenhower's America.

I never knew my grandfathers as they were both dead before I was born. I heard stories about them and the closest I came to them was standing on the dirt that covered them. My parents would always purchase geraniums, those god awful red flowers that stink to high heaven to adorn the graves. I used to protest their decision and ask why wouldn't they buy something that didn't turn the back seat of the car into a stinking mildew factory. I had to sit in the back seat with them as we drove to the cemetery so my complaint was valid! We spent all of 20 minutes at the grave and I'd look around at the other headstones and read the dates. It seemed near impossible to believe that people were born in 1890. As a young man in my 20's stumbling across overgrown graves in Foster, it seemed odd as hell to read a gravestone that purported that the occupant was born in 1698.

It holds true; if you didn't witness it, it's just ephemeral. Anything that occurs before the year you were born, are strange rumors only.

My grandfathers were just rumors to me and looking upon the graves were weak evidence of lives, lived.

Memorial? What memory? Remember what?

The only Memorial Day remembrance that holds true to me was a person that wasn't related to me in the least way. He was Michael D., a neighbor a block away who I saw as a child and I saw him in his dress uniform a few times. I had never seen a military man before I met Mike. Even though it was for less than a few minutes, those first time experiences as a child tend to burn memories deep.

The next time I head that name was from a couple of neighbors quietly discussing the condition of his body when it was returned from Vietnam. The adults were speaking quietly enough to keep us kids from becoming aware, but my hearing was like that of an owl then. What I heard didn't seem real.

“Jesus! Closed coffin?” Mr. J said.

“Yeah, no head, upper torso...just the abdomen and on down came back.” said another neighbor.

**

“Basket case!” my brother chuckled, when I told him of what I had heard. “They scooped up what was left, put it in a bamboo basket and put that in the coffin!”

I then believed it as my brother dug out an old Mad Magazine to show me. Mad Magazine, at one time, to protest the war in Vietnam, published pictures of dead, burnt, shot up and blown apart American servicemen. It had a shock value to wake people up, to show just exactly what an American soldier looks like when hit by an AK 47 or other weapon. They demystified the glamour and legends surrounding freedom loving American GI and reduced him to everyday reality. You could take Captain America, a superhero, and completely de-power-fy him by showing him spilling his guts after a machete slit across his belly. That's what Mad Magazine was up too.

“Look at THIS one” my brother tells me. Yeah, a pile of goo lying on some hillside somewhere in the forests of a place called Dak To, which to my seven year old brain, sounded like an alien and exotic entree on a Chinese take out menu. At seven, you can't quite process what you're looking at, but still, I knew what I was looking at was real.

**

Memorial Day for me, if I ever really think of it at all, is for one person, Micheal D. Of all the military personnel I might have known, barely known or heard about, he's the one I can think of on Memorial Day. 1971...he's been that long since dead. Shit...45 years. Well Mike, I do remember you.

How's that for a long term memory that's not a rumor?