Memorial Day Archives

May 28, 2022May 28, 2022

A Soldier Frozen in Time

There’s no telling what might pop up when you start digging through boxes of Steinhoff heirlooms.

It’s appropriate that this metal toy soldier came to light in time to commemorate Memorial Day. It looks like he might be dressed in a World War I uniform. I don’t ever recall seeing him before, so I have no idea of his history.

Now that he’s had a chance to see the light, I’m going to have him march over to the Cape Girardeau County History Center in Jackson so he can be enjoyed by others.

One Tin Soldier

While working on this guy, One Tim Soldier, the 1971 hit song in the movie Billy Jack, came to mind.

The song told the story of two neighboring tribes, the warlike Valley People and the peaceful Mountain Kingdom which possesses a great treasure buried under a stone. The Valley People demand the treasure. The Mountain People respond that they will share it with “their brothers,” but the Valley People invade and slaughter the Mountain People. On overturning the stone, they find nothing except the words “Peace On Earth” inscribed beneath it.

The song ends

Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You can justify it in the end
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away

Previous stories about veterans and memorials

May 25, 2020May 25, 2020

Louis K. Juden – Died ‘Crushing the Huns’

I was fighting off mosquitoes while walking around New Lorimier Cemetery in Cape this week looking for graves of people who died in the 1918 flu epidemic, while also keeping an eye out for military graves.

On my second or third pass down a row, I spotted a familiar name on the back of a stone. It had a strange inscription: “REMAINS REINTERED AND BURIED HERE JULY 24, 192?” (I can’t be sure from the photo what the last digit is.)

The name was familiar because the local American Legion Post 63 has taken his name. (Although, I was surprised not to find any of his history on the post’s website. Maybe I missed it.)

The front of the stone tells the story

LIEUT. LOUIS K. JUDEN

R.I.O 120TH INFANTRY

30TH DIVISION

BORN AUG. 11, 1890

DIED OCT. 28, 1918

IN HOSPITAL AT ETRETAT, FRANCE

FROM THE EFFECTS OF GAS RECEIVED

IN FRONT LINES.

HIS REMAINS ARE “OVER THERE.”

HE GAVE HIS LIFE HELPING CRUSH THE HUNS.

Nurse who was with him wrote his grandmother

The nurse who cared for Lieut. Juden in France wrote a letter to his grandmother, Mrs. L.F. Klostermann. Unfortunately, the microfiche copy of the letter is almost illegible in The Missourian’s archives.

Parents visit grave in France

Mr. and Mrs. Juden visited their son’s grave in France in 1920.

Biography in The Fort Sheridan Association History

The Green Fields of France

While editing the photos, a song, The Green Fields of France, came up in my playlist. These words hit me hard when I looked at the portrait of a young man.

Well how do you do, young Willy McBride?
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while ‘neath the warm summer sun
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in nineteen-sixteen
I hope you died well
And I hope you died clean
Oh young Willy McBride, was is it slow and obscene?

[Chorus]
Did they beat the drums slowly?
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play the Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave here a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
Although you died back in nineteen-sixteen
In that faithful heart, are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed then forever behind a glass pane
In an old photograph torn, battered, and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

May 29, 2016

Memorial Day 2016

I’ve been busy of late getting a new edition of my Smelterville book off to the binders and bouncing between Florida and Missouri. I’ve also been working with Curator Jessica and Carla Jordan on several exhibits for later this summer and fall. That’s the excuse I’m going to give for slacking off of late.

On this 2016 Memorial Day weekend, this sign at the Mound City National Cemetery came to mind. It was part of a longer story I did about the curious case of Sgt. Samuel Ginter. If you missed it the first time around, it’s worth visiting.

Previous stories about veterans and memorials

May 25, 2014May 29, 2016

Seeing the Elephant

It was the summer of 1975. Saigon had fallen and the Vietnam War was over. My draft lottery was high enough that I wasn’t called, even though my draft status was 1A for a brief time in 1969.

I talked The Post into sending me to Camp Blanding with a local National Guard unit for a week of summer camp. I wrote about the experience in 2012. On this Memorial Day weekend, my thoughts turn back to that era.

National Guard was a safe haven

The unit was a mixture of young guys with long hair who wore wigs over their tresses serving alongside men with gray in their hair. One guardsman wore jump wings on his cap and sported tattoos on his arms listing almost every major battle in the Pacific during World War II.

Seeing the elephant

The phrase “seeing the elephant” popped up in many Civil War letters and diaries, but Curator Jessica said it’s been around longer than that. G.W. Kendall, in Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition in 1844, wrote, “When a man is disappointed in any thing he undertakes, when he has seen enough, when he gets sick and tired of any job he may have set himself about, he has ‘seen the elephant.'”

I didn’t know much about the background men in the unit, but I could see in the eyes of some of the guardsmen they were looking way beyond the pines and palmettos of north central Florida. What was a war game to most was very real to some.

2000-Yard Stare

Life Magazine published a painting by World War II artist and correspondent Tom Lea in 1945. The 1944 panting of a Marine at the Battle of Peleliu – the site of the highest casualty rate of any battle in the Pacfic – became known as the 2,000-Yard Stare.

Lea said of his subject, “He left the States 31 months ago. He was wounded in his first campaign. He has had tropical diseases. He half-sleeps at night and gouges Japs out of holes all day. Two-thirds of his company has been killed or wounded. He will return to attack this morning. How much can a human being endure?”

Memorial Day is more than picnics and a day off from work.