There are photo galleries and photogalleries — and then there’s the moving photo gallery on remembering the fallen here via CNN.
Also, we often run Hartford Courant cartoonist Bob Englehart’s work here on TMV via Cagle Cartoons. Here is the short, touching post he has on The Cagle Post which we’ll run here in full since it is Memorial Day:
My father served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. The OSS was the forerunner to the CIA. When I was a kid, I’d ask the inevitable question, “What’d you do in the war, daddy.”
He’d say “Dodged bombs in London for three years,” and then he’d change the subject. I didn’t find out about the brutality he witnessed and friends he lost until the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1995. He went into detail, to a point, and then his eyes welled up with tears and he stopped talking. But he was one of the lucky ones. He survived in one piece to play 18 holes of golf at 90 years old and to begin to forget about the war.
As long as there are human beings living on the planet Earth, we’ll have war. So many good people have died in wars designed to save the world from a megalomaniac like Hitler, or for unclear wars like Iraq and Vietnam, or nation building in Afghanistan, or to hold this country together like in the Civil War. Good people die in bad wars too. I know so many veterans, good people, who say that they simply did what their country asked.
Take a moment this weekend and say a thank you to the good people who died so that we may choose whatever we want to do on Memorial Day because in the end, it’s about freedom.
NOTE: My father Richard Gandelman also served in World War II. His years in the military seemed to him to be among the most harrowing but rewarding of his life. You could tell when he talked about it.
He was proud of his service, but he said he would never ever see Saving Private Ryan because he would never talk about some of the scenes he witnessed in wartime. When 9/11 took place I always felt as if it was a special horror to my father, as if his reaction inside was I thought we got rid of this kind of monster back in World War II and now the world is facing this kind of being again.
His Army uniform always hung proudly in his closet. So did his helmet. He spent some of his time serving in Australia and seemed forever smitten with that country. Except for all the lamb. He had been stationed where he could smell food cooking from the kitchen which was often lamb. Old lamb. And my mother never made it when he was home. He was part of the Greatest Generation who saw their duty and did it, no complaints and never looking back — except, perhaps, with a bit of pride that his generation put everything aside to unite and make the world safer. He died on May 27, 2007 — Memorial Day…a day before my mother Helen Gandelman’s birthday. She turns 91 on May 28th.
Here’s Bob Englehart’s latest Memorial Day cartoon:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.