Memorial Day--Compassion for a Community of Soldiers

Memorial Day has got me thinking about my own feelings about our soldiers, and how we honor them. It's easy to watch a parade of firetrucks with sirens blaring. It's easy to bow respectfully to our WW2 vets, whose war so clearly had them in the right. Our Vietnam vets feel a bit less comfortable, reminding us of their own discontent with their cause. Iraq vets, well we want to be supportive, and we are...but my, doesn't that bring up a lot of politics and resentment and heartache, knowing that our support for them is so easily misconstrued as support for the policies that brought them there in the first place. I think the slogan "Support our troops, Bring them home" is the best effort I've seen to separate out the one from the other.  A lot of people would rather not think about it too much, particularly in light of what seems to many (myself included) as an unnecessary but lucrative culture of war in our country. Still, it bears some examination. What does Memorial Day mean to me?

As Uranus entered Aries yesterday, we are all wondering how this energy will play out. It's a nervous energy, potentially combining surprise and war. Another way to think about it is a community (Uranus) of individuals, or of soldiers. (Aries).  As Neptune, planet of memories, compassion, and martyrdom turns retrograde today, I find myself thinking of the soldiers I have known. Specifically, all the old and incapacitated soldiers I spent two years of my childhood visiting in a VA hospital.  Whether I'm influenced more by compassion and pity  for their suffering, their sacrifices, and their disabilities, or just that Neptune also rules places of retreat from the world like hospitals, either way, my faded memories carry a dream-like quality that holds surprising sway. Though I was visiting one soldier in particular, you spend enough time in a sad, sterile place like that and you wind up making friends with the most unlikely of people. As a child, I didn't understand that the reason some of the men were in wheelchairs was because someone had them sent far from home to get their legs blown off.

I understood at the time that these sad and friendly men had been sleeping in metal railed beds since they were young, but my childish concept of time didn't really do justice to the amount of a life lost to 30 or 40 years lived in a veterans hospital. These poor men with their tubes, wheelchairs and strange unpleasant smells, legs or arms missing, or a disfigured face, certainly knew that they scared us, but they were kind, and reached out to us when we needed to be elsewhere so our my mom could talk to the doctors. I absorbed their experiences in my child's porous way, and ached from it, ached from knowing they hurt, and that I couldn't understand why. They put up with our innocent questions because it must have been so nice to see young life in that place of sickness and flashbacks, deformity and death.

I still don't have an answer though, twenty-five years later, on this Memorial Day. "Why don't you have your legs?"