Farmers Weekly Review

By Nick Reiher

How do we keep these straight?

“Memorial Day starts with ‘M,’ so that’s the one in May. Labor Day is the one at the beginning of September.”

Got it. Memorial Day. The unofficial beginning of summer, and Labor Day the unofficial end, both carrying coveted three-day weekends for many.

Memorial Day weekend. Many community pools open. Booze goes on sale, as do mattresses that didn’t sell on Presidents Days.

When I was Editorial Page editor at the Herald News, I would write editorials with pithy comments like, “I hope you have nothing to do, and all day to do it.”

For many years, this is how we thought about Memorial Day. The first three-day weekend with a chance for nice weather. Although many Memorial Days seemed to be cool and rainy.

Maybe Mother Nature was trying to tell us something by dampening our grills and picnics.

I’m not sure what changed, but in the past decade or so, we seem to be focusing more on what Memorial Day really means. And how it’s different from Veterans Day and Armed Forces Day.

Maybe it’s having a National Cemetery in our backyard, with the number of grave markers spreading each year, heading toward 100,000 likely in a few years.

Maybe it’s the funeral processions wending their way down Illinois 53 toward the cemetery, vying with trucks in a slow, somber procession, sometimes with only a few cars behind the hearse.

I’m not sure when people stopped making fun of the old guy in the Army cap, stumbling around town after having way too many. Again.

Finally, someone maybe listened to him after he had had just enough to be able to share stories of the horrors he saw in Vietnam, Korea, Normandy or Iwo Jima. The friends who died next to him, maybe in his arms.

My Dad was a bombardier on a B-17 in World War II, stationed in England. He flew 35 missions and was home by the time he was 20.

He never talked about specific missions, only joking about weird things he had seen, like hail bouncing off the plane’s wings like ping-pong balls.

He never talked about the sub-zero conditions in a miserably loud bomber on runs that took more than a dozen hours.

He never talked about the other planes that got shot down. The friends he lost in those missions.

He said only that “Twelve O’clock High” was the most realistic war movie he had seen. If you haven’t seen it, the movie deals with extreme combat fatigue.

Dad and the old guy on the street were lucky to make it home. So many thousands didn’t.

Probably not until “Saving Private Ryan” did those of us who were not there realized the dangers of the landing at Normandy, still heavily fortified although the Germans weren’t 100 percent sure that was the location of the invasion.

Unless we have answered the door to get the word about a loved one who died while serving our country, we don’t know the pain.

Thankfully, for whatever reason, we began paying more attention to what Memorial Day means, and how lucky many of us are not to have first-hand education on the subject.

Maybe I’ve had my head elsewhere, but I haven’t heard much about pool openings, or the best sausages to grill over the best charcoal, or the best beer to wash it down with.

There is more focus on local ceremonies honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice. They’ll include veterans of varying ages, which allows those men and women to honor their fallen friends.

In August, the Village of Romeoville will host the Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall, which has visited Will County several times in the past. While the memorial is a smaller reproduction, it still carries a large meaning for many veterans, family and friends who lost loved ones.

I hope as we celebrated Memorial Day, we thought to salute the fallen heroes who made our freedom possible.

That should make it easier to remember.

Nick Reiher is editor of Farmers Weekly Review.