The Weekly Shriek -- Remembering

I sat at a back table, sipping diet cola and picking at a salad.

A couple squeezed into the booth next to me. They leaned forward on their elbows, intent on their conversation.

"They are dying over there." The woman wiped a tear off her cheek. "They are babies and they are dying."

"We can't leave now," the man sitting across from her said. "It's unacceptable to leave the field of battle before we achieve our objectives."

"It's a political war," she countered. "We can't make them accept our values."

The man grimaced. "If we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them here."

"There's no way to win this one," she said. "I don't even know what the goal is any more."

He hit the table with his fist. "If we leave now, the ones we've lost will have died in vain!"

Their intense conversation faded into the background as a single thought stuck in my head. Died in vain?

I left the restaurant heartsick. Could that be true? Could the outcome of an event invalidate the value of the effort?

I called my husband on the way home. "Do you think the Indians died in vain?"

"What?"

"You know, the Indians that Custer killed?"

"Have you been reading Little Big Man again?"

"No. I was just thinking about my Uncle D.G."

"Your dad's brother?"

"He was run over by a truck during World War II."

"What does that have to do with the Indians that Custer killed?"

"Could be Custer himself, actually."

"What are you talking about?"

"Dying in vain."

"Dying in vain?"

"Yeah, what is it?"

He was quiet. "A useless death?"

"I don't like it."

"Me either," he said.

I hung up and wiped away an unexpected tear on my cheek.

"Maybe death is just death - however it happens," I pondered to an online friend a few days later.

"People need for the deaths of their loved ones to have meaning," he typed. "It's better to have died while accomplishing something."

"Test pilot deaths trump daredevil ones?"

"Something like that."

"Is my grief more profound if my loved one wiped out on deadman's curve than if he died rescuing a little girl from a swirling tide?"

"Sure."

"I dunno -- even a serial killer's mother cries for him," I typed before logging off for the night.

"I can't stop thinking about it," I told my friend and writing partner Pat the next day.

"Maybe there's a story brewing," she said soothingly.

"Maybe - but it's slow coming."

"Was it the bus trip to D.C. to see the World War II Memorial that got to you?"

"Kinda," I said. "There were so many of them."

"There always are," she sighed.

"Seems to me that the reasons for war change as time passes - taxation without representation, Manifest Destiny, self defense, conquest, empire building, states rights, liberation, dominoes. They were important reasons at the time - even if they are harder for other generations to understand."

"I'm not sure that I even know the reasons for some wars - like the Philippine Insurrection or when we sent troops to Somalia," she said. "Some make sense on reflection, some don't."

"Does that change the value of the participants? Do those who died because they believed in the mores of their times lose their status when we change our minds about war?"

I could see that the thought upset her too. "I hope not."

The next day, Pat and I met with five men in their seventies. In 1950, they went to Korea in the opening days of the war. The North Korean invaders surrounded their units and captured those that they didn't kill. Enemy soldiers took their clothes and shoes. Over the next three months, these men faced beatings, political brainwashing, starvation, thirst, illness and the deaths of their comrades. They marched almost six hundred miles - sleeping in barns, fields and schools along the way. In Pyongyang, their guards herded them onto a train. North of Sunchon, the train stopped in a tunnel. Lured off the railcars in groups of thirty by the promise of food, they were executed. In total, almost two hundred men died there. Twenty survived. Today, only eight are still alive.

As I spent time with each man in turn, I was struck by the suffering still evident in their eyes. Being a prisoner of war isn't something one gets over. Even so, each of them went on - marrying, having children - trying to make sense of war and cruelty and the incredible gift of life that they received in the midst of carnage. Their sacrifices were real - they were real.

Afterwards, I flew home thinking about how much these men mattered to our country, to history - to me. Suddenly, I realized -- people only die in vain if their efforts are not valued - or if they are forgotten. Shaken, I got off the plane determined to find out more about my Uncle D.G. - and the others.