OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Forgotten no more

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

The Stars and Stripes is, with increasing frequency, being used for the kind of sad ceremonial we would rather do without.
But if there is any comfort to be taken from untimely death in the service of one’s country, it is that the death of an American soldier is an event of singular importance and that little effort is spared in honoring the memory of the young man or woman who has made the ultimate sacrifice.
And yet, it’s difficult to maintain that dignified sense of singularity if the casualty list starts to accelerate to the point where a few turns into dozens, hundreds, thousands.
It was some time after the end of the Vietnam War, for example, that the nation began to catch up with the passing of more that 58,000 young Americans in the battle that raged for years across Southeast Asia.
But catch up it did, and in a strikingly reverential manner.
The Vietnam memorial wall in Washington, D.C., is no tomb of the unknowns. It bears names, and it declares that once there was an individual human being who walked this earth, if only to die too young.
The wall, in a physical but also deeply emotional way, fills the cracks below which there was the potential for wholly undeserved anonymity.
And if there is one thing that an American soldier does not deserve and that is the fate of the forgotten. The Irishmen who died fighting in the Korean War were too long forgotten by the nation whose uniform they wore.
As with the raising of the Vietnam memorial, due recognition has followed after the end of the war that killed them.
In this case 50 years.
But finally, the 28 young men have been accorded the singular recognition due the American soldier, in death as in life. Though some are buried in this country, some across the ocean in Ireland, they have all in a sense finally made it home to the country where their living dreams lay.
The importance of the passing from this life of each has been properly and fully acknowledged. They now rest with all the others who have stood in the way of a world that would diminish the significance of each passing life.
They are American soldiers. They are American citizens. They are no longer forgotten.

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