A Remembering Day

This is the first thing of mine to be published, on November 10, 1962, in the Guelph Daily Mercury. If I were writing it now, in 2003, I might well choose another image than jehad, but I was sincere (if still reaching towards maturity) at the time.

The Mercury may have been a small-city newspaper, but I well remember that its editors showed uncommon insight five years earlier, when the USSR orbited this planet's first artificial satellite; major papers had headlines like "Red Star in the Sky" or "Soviet Surprise!" but the Mercury's front-page banner was "First Day of the Space Age." I felt honored to be granted space on its pages.

D-day happened and is celebrated on the sixth of June. But more as a remembrance for soldiers than for the people at large. It is a time for reunions, for standing on cliffs above once-bloody beaches to listen to the echoes. For walking between the rows of graves in France, or sitting in a quiet living room fingering medals.

It is now, five months and five days after D-day's anniversary, that is the time for the rest of us to remember this battle and all others like it.

Not all battles, in fact very few, are fought for an end that justifies them. Among the least worth their cost are those between religious sects. But out of this kind of carnage has come an Arabic word, "Jehad," the call to holy war. This word, removed from its original context, is a summing-up of what we should remember on November the eleventh.

It is a kind of glory; not of killing men, but of committing your own life; of rushing into and through the vales of death to come up against and batter down the face of evil. A glory that brings true the mythology of the holy man's raised finger, that wipes away all past sins. An act to justify, in itself, almost any man's life.

More than any other, the battle of D-day is an example of that glory, not alone by its size, but by its nature; the crash of a titanic wave of avenging free men upon the concentrated embodiment of all that has ever stood against freedom. Whatever fears and cynicisms any man carried on to the Normandy beaches, he carried also a corner of freedom's banner, and that is really all that matters.

So, for this day, go out to the memorials, and stand silent and uncovered; and see the marching veterans, and remember the ghosts marching with them, not as they may be or have been on any other day, good or petty or tragic, but as they and their comrades were on that one morning, when the bugle-word Jehad! was sounded and they stood up to answer.

Whatever freedom you have, but for these men, you would not.

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