N.Y. Times: Silence Speaks Volumes at Intersection of Views on Iraq War
“LEWES, Del. — No one talks, but a lot is said at the intersection of Savannah Road and Kings Highway. Peace demonstrators hung strips of cloth bearing the names of soldiers killed in Iraq as part of their demonstration. Small cities and towns, like Lewes, Del., left, are suffering a large portion of the deaths in the fighting in Iraq. …”
Salon.com: Memorial Day
“For me, like most other Americans, Memorial Day is a time for barbecuing, playing Frisbee, loading up coolers with iced beer, and getting out of town. I usually don’t think about America’s war dead on the last weekend of May any more than I think about our nation’s independence on the Fourth of July, or about the birth of Jesus on Christmas.
“No, my memorial days are scattered and irregular. It is monuments that have most often triggered reveries about fallen soldiers. The words ‘Is it nothing to you?’ inscribed on the great gray World War I obelisk in downtown Vancouver, Canada, stopped me in my tracks late on a summer afternoon many years ago. I had not known this biblical phrase from Lamentations, never seen it on a war memorial before. Maybe it’s a British thing. But for whatever reason, it arrested me, and those long-vanished men who died in fields in France or Germany suddenly appeared, a ghostly company waiting for the simple tribute of memory. …”
Chicago Tribune: Lessons from the Great War
“Frank Buckles, 106, lied about his age to get into the Army when he was 16. He served in England and France, but he never was close to the fighting in World War I. He lives on a 330-acre cattle farm in West Virginia.”
[Later: The full King James Version of the Lamentations verse cited above is: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.”