Thoughts on Memorial Day

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

THE SOLDIER'S FAITH

[An Address Delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895, at a Meeting Called by the Graduating Class of Harvard University. President Theodore Roosevelt's admiration for this speech was a factor in Holmes' nomination to the US Supreme Court. The most quoted line of this speech is "We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top."]

Any day in Washington Street [in Boston], when the throng is greatest and busiest, you may see a blind man playing a flute. I suppose that some one hears him. Perhaps also my pipe may reach the heart of some passer in the crowd.

I once heard a man say, "Where Vanderbilt sits, there is the head of the table. I teach my son to be rich." He said what many think. For although the generation born about 1840, and now governing the world, has fought two at least of the greatest wars in history, and has witnessed others, war is out of fashion, and the man who commands attention of his fellows is the man of wealth. Commerce is the great power. The aspirations of the world are those of commerce. Moralists and philosophers, following its lead, declare that war is wicked, foolish, and soon to disappear.

The society for which many philanthropists, labor reformers, and men of fashion unite in longing is one in which they may be comfortable and may shine without much trouble or any danger. The unfortunately growing hatred of the poor for the rich seems to me to rest on the belief that money is the main thing (a belief in which the poor have been encouraged by the rich), more than on any other grievance. Most of my hearers would rather that their daughters or their sisters should marry a son of one of the great rich families than a regular army officer, were he as beautiful, brave, and gifted as Sir William Napier. I have heard the question asked whether our war was worth fighting, after all. There are many, poor and rich, who think that love of country is an old wife's tale, to be replaced by interest in a labor union, or, under the name of cosmopolitanism, by a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost.

Meantime we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt aginst pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented, and a whole literature of sympathy has sprung into being which points out in story and in verse how hard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it is that any one should fail.

Even science has had its part in the tendencies which we observe. It has shaken established religion in the minds of very many. It has pursued analysis until at last this thrilling world of colors and passions and sounds has seemed fatally to resolve itself into one vast network of vibrations endlessly weaving an aimless web, and the rainbow flush of cathedral windows, which once to enraptured eyes appeared the very smile of God, fades slowly out into the pale irony of the void.

And yet from vast orchestras still comes the music of mighty symphonies. Our painters even now are spreading along the walls of our Library glowing symbols of mysteries still real, and the hardly silenced cannon of the East proclaim once more that combat and pain still are the portion of man. For my own part, I believe that the struggle for life is the order of the world, at which it is vain to repine. I can imagine the burden changed in the way it is to be borne, but I cannot imagine that it ever will be lifted from men's backs. I can imagine a future in which science shall have passed from the combative to the dogmatic stage, and shall have gained such catholic acceptance that it shall take control of life, and condemn at once with instant execution what now is left for nature to destroy. But we are far from such a future, and we cannot stop to amuse or to terrify ourselves with dreams. Now, at least, and perhaps as long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle, and he has to take the chances of war. If it is our business to fight, the book for the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch. It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds. Sooner or later we shall fall; but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can.

Behind every scheme to make the world over, lies the question, What kind of world do you want? The ideals of the past for men have been drawn from war, as those for women have been drawn from motherhood. For all our prophecies, I doubt if we are ready to give up our inheritance. Who is there who would not like to be thought a gentleman? Yet what has that name been built on but the soldier's choice of honor rather than life? To be a soldier or descended from soldiers, in time of peace to be ready to give one's life rather than suffer disgrace, that is what the word has meant; and if we try to claim it at less cost than a splendid carelessness for life, we are trying to steal the good will without the responsibilities of the place. We will not dispute about tastes. The man of the future may want something different. But who of us could endure a world, although cut up into five-acre lots, and having no man upon it who was not well fed and well housed, without the divine folly of honor, without the senseless passion for knowledge outreaching the flaming bounds of the possible, without ideals the essence of which is that they can never be achieved? I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.

Most men who know battle know the cynic force with which the thoughts of common sense will assail them in times of stress; but they know that in their greatest moments faith has trampled those thoughts under foot. If you wait in line, suppose on Tremont Street Mall, ordered simply to wait and do nothing, and have watched the enemy bring their guns to bear upon you down a gentle slope like that of Beacon Street, have seen the puff of the firing, have felt the burst of the spherical case-shot as it came toward you, have heard and seen the shrieking fragments go tearing through your company, and have known that the next or the next shot carries your fate; if you have advanced in line and have seen ahead of you the spot you must pass where the rifle bullets are striking; if you have ridden at night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spottsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode you heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you; if you have been in the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the splat of the bullets upon the trees, and as you moved have felt your foot slip upon a dead man's body; if you have had a blind fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear --if, in short, as some, I hope many, who hear me, have known, you have known the vicissitudes of terror and triumph in war; you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of. You know your own weakness and are modest; but you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face anniliation for a blind belief.

From the beginning, to us, children of the North, life has seemed a place hung about by dark mists, out of which comes the pale shine of dragon's scales and the cry of fighting men, and the sound of swords. Beowolf, Milton, Durer, Rembrandt, Schopenhauer, Turner, Tennyson, from the first war song of the race to the stall-fed poetry of modern English drawing rooms, all have had the same vision, and all have had a glimpse of a light to be followed. "The end of wordly life awaits us all. Let him who may, gain honor ere death. That is best for a warrior when he is dead." So spoke Beowolf a thousand years ago.

Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O Young Mariner,
Down to the haven.
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel,
And crowd your canvas.
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam.

So sang Tennyson in the voice of the dying Merlin.

When I went to the war I thought that soldiers were old men. I remembered a picture of the revolutionary soldier which some of you may have seen, representing a white-haired man with his flint-lock slung across his back. I remembered one or two examples of revolutionary soldiers wom I have met, and I took no account of the lapse of time. It was not long after, in winter quarters, as I was listening to some of the sentimental songs in vogue, such as--

Farewell, Mother, you may never
See your darling boy again,

that it came over me that the army was made up of what I should now call very young men. I dare say that my illusion has been shared by some of those now present, as they have looked at us upon whose heads the white shadows have begun to fall. But the truth is that war is the business of youth and early middle age. You who called this assemblage together, not we, would be the soldiers of another war, if we should have one, and we speak to you as the dying Merlin did in the verse which I have just quoted. Would that the blind man's pipe might be transformed by Merlin's magic, to make you hear the bugles as once we heard them beneath the morning stars! For you it is that now is sung the Song of the Sword:--

The War-Thing, the Comrade,
Father of Honor,
And Giver of kingship,
The fame-smith, the song master.
Priest (saith the Lord)
Of his marriage with victory
...
Clear singing, clean slicing;
Sweet spoken, soft finishing;
Making death beautiful
Life but a coin
To be staked in a pastime
Whose playing is more
Than the transfer of being;
Arch-anarch, chief builder,
Prince and evangelist,
I am the Will of God:
I am the Sword.

War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. I hope it may be long before we are called again to sit at that master's feet. But some teacher of the kind we all need. In this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger. We need it in this time of individualist negations, with its literature of French and American humor, revolting at discipline, loving flesh-pots, and denying that anything is worthy of reverence--in order that we may remember all that buffoons forget. We need it everywhere and at all times. For high and dangerous action teaches us to believe as right beyond dispute things for which our doubting minds are slow to find words of proof. Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism. The proof comes later, and even may never come. Therefore I rejoice at every dangerous sport which I see pursued. The students at Heidelberg, with their sword-slashed faces, inspire me with sincere respect. I gaze with delight upon our polo players. If once in a while in our rough riding a neck is broken, I regard it, not as a waste, but as a price well paid for the breeding of a race fit for headship and command.

We do not save our traditions, in our country. The regiments whose battle-flags were not large enough to hold the names of the battles they had fought vanished with the surrender of Lee, although their memories inherited would have made heroes for a century. It is the more necessary to learn the lesson afresh from perils newly sought, and perhaps it is not vain for us to tell the new generation what we learned in our day, and what we still believe. That the joy of life is living, is to put out all one's powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacles overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier's faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battlefield, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory more than the temptations of wallowing ease, but to know that one's final judge and only rival is oneself: with all our failures in act and thought, these things we learned from noble enemies in Virginia or Georgia or on the Mississippi, thirty years ago; these things we believe to be true.

"Life is not lost", said she,
"for which is bought Endless renown."

We learned also, and we still believe, that love of country is not yet an idle name.

Deare countrey! O how dearly deare
Ought thy rememberance, and perpetuall band
Be to thy foster child, that from thy hand
Did commun breath and nouriture receave!
How brutish is it not to understand
How much to her we owe, that all us gave;
That much to her we owe, that all us gave;
That gave unto us all, whatever good we have!

As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.

Three years ago died the old colonel of my regiment, the Twentieth Massachusetts. [Web note: Col. William Raymond Lee] He gave the regiment its soul. No man could falter who heard his "Forward, Twentieth!" I went to his funeral. From a side door of the church a body of little choir- boys came in alike a flight of careless doves. At the same time the doors opened at the front, and up the main aisle advanced his coffin, followed by the few grey heads who stood for the men of the Twentieth, the rank and file whom he had loved, and whom he led for the last time. The church was empty. No one remembered the old man whom we were burying, no one save those next to him, and us. And I said to myself, The Twentieth has shrunk to a skeleton, a ghost, a memory, a forgotten name which we other old men alone keep in our hearts. And then I thought: It is right. It is as the colonel would have it. This also is part of the soldier's faith: Having known great things, to be content with silence. Just then there fell into my hands a little song sung by a warlike people on the Danube, which seemed to me fit for a soldier's last word, another song of the sword, but a song of the sword in its scabbard, a song of oblivion and peace.

A soldier has been buried on the battlefield.

And when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked from the deep dark grave:
"Did the banner flutter then?"
"Not so, my hero," the wind replied.
"The fight is done, but the banner won,
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,
Have borne it in triumph hence."
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
"I am content."

Then he heareth the lovers laughing pass,
and the soldier asks once more:
"Are these not the voices of them that love,
That love--and remember me?"
"Not so, my hero," the lovers say,
"We are those that remember not;
For the spring has come and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot."
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
"I am content."

Memorial Day Reality

A Union Tested by War
Military Couples Recast Future in Face of the Unthinkable

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 28, 2006; A01

A few weeks after an explosion tore off his legs and part of his right arm, Army Sgt. Joseph Bozik felt the time had come to tell his girlfriend she no longer was bound by their plans for marriage.

He asked his mother to leave his hospital room at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and addressed his girlfriend, Jayme Peters. "Be completely honest with me," he said. "If you want to go home, that's fine."

As she broke into tears, Bozik said he'd be okay, and he would understand completely. He knew she had not bargained for a husband like this.

Along with its impact on bodies and minds, the war in Iraq has deeply affected military marriages and relationships. It has presented some young couples with an age-old choice: wed before departure to the front or wait until homecoming. And it has forced married couples to endure long, repeated separations.

But experts say the hardest challenge can be when a spouse or lover comes home catastrophically injured.

"The young stud that the woman married, when he comes back injured, is no longer a stud," said one Army counselor.

Couples have had to face reunions in which the returning soldier or Marine has lost one, two or three limbs, has been disfigured or paralyzed, or has suffered a permanent, debilitating brain injury.

The couple must reexamine the foundation on which their relationship is built, experts say. The two might have to accept new roles, in which the spouse may be the chief breadwinner and caregiver. And the injured service member may feel like less of a person and wonder if he or she is still really loved.

Kay Eady, 50, a teacher from Albany, Ga., said she often tells her husband, Clarence, 41, who is recovering at Walter Reed from the loss of a leg in Iraq: "You're more a man to me now -- for someone to go through that and come out smiling."

But Michael J. Wagner, director of Walter Reed's medical family assistance center, said he once heard a spouse say in front of her injured husband: "How can I deal with this? He's not even a whole man anymore."

One young soldier at Walter Reed recuperating from a double amputation said recently that his war injuries were the last blow to his four-year marriage. He said his wife already was unhappy with his two tours in Iraq.

Speaking anonymously because he is in the midst of a divorce, he said she left the hospital partway through his recovery, telling his mother she was not coming back.

"That was rough," he said. "I got on the phone to her and talked to her and cried. . . . I was like, 'I got nobody.' That was the hardest thing. If she had just stuck it out a little longer."

Combat in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced 424 amputees, according to a Walter Reed spokesman, and 459 traumatic brain injuries have been treated at the Naval hospital in Bethesda, which specializes in brain-damaged casualties.

Steven Tice, a veteran trauma counselor who lost an arm and a shoulder in Vietnam in 1970, said it also is possible for the challenge of a major war injury to enrich a marriage in the long term. Tice married in 1970 after returning from Vietnam, was divorced in 1977, then remarried his wife the following year after getting counseling for combat stress. They have been together for 36 years and have three children.

"I think it can be a key to a thriving marriage," he said in a recent interview. If a couple can come out of such a calamity "with compassion for each other, and assist each other in negotiating the planet, you've got some healthy individuals."

* * *

Jayme Peters was sitting in her car outside a CVS pharmacy in College Station, Tex., about to open a Gatorade when she got a frantic phone call from Joey Bozik's mother, Gail. "Something's happened to Joey!" Gail cried. "Something's happened to Joey!"

It was Oct. 27, 2004, and Gail had just learned that Joey had been terribly wounded in an explosion in Iraq. He had lost both legs and one arm.

Joey, now 28, was a strapping, 6-foot-1 soldier. He'd been working out, was in top shape and was too smart and alert. God had plans for him, Jayme thought. He couldn't be wounded.

A native of Wilmington, N.C., he had been serving in Afghanistan when a mutual friend connected them via e-mail in March 2003. Now 24, she was a college gymnast from Tyler, Tex., and student at Texas A&M.

They courted after he got home and soon were making plans. She would finish college; he would pursue a career in federal law enforcement.

Then he learned he was being sent to Iraq. They looked at engagement rings, and he had planned on proposing to her once he got home.

Just before he left, they talked about what might happen. Jayme told him she didn't care if he lost limbs. The only circumstance in which they might part ways would be if he suffered a severe brain injury.

"I think you would want me to go on with my life," she said she told him. "That's the only reason I will leave you. Otherwise, don't you ever let it cross your mind."

Neither of them really thought he might be maimed.

"That wasn't the plan at all," he said.

* * *

Carrie and Adam Kisielewski decided that marriage couldn't wait until he returned from Iraq.

What if he was killed in battle?

"I wanted to have the chance to say we were married," she said. "I didn't want to go through my life thinking I never had a chance to marry him."

So they married last June. In August, the Marine lance corporal and an officer were searching an empty school near Fallujah when they triggered an explosive device. The officer died, and Adam lost his left arm at the shoulder and right leg below the knee.

Thinking he was dying, Adam asked his buddies to tell his wife he was sorry he wouldn't be able to buy her a house. "They pretty much told me to go to hell, that I'd have to tell her myself," he recalled in an interview. "They gave me a reason to stay alive."

Once Adam, 22, reached the intensive care unit at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Carrie, 27, moved to a hospital guest house to be near him.

They had been married about 12 weeks and never had genuinely lived together.

An Army friend had warned her that a grieving Adam might push her and other loved ones away and shut them out of his life.

Mostly, she was overwhelmed by how helpless he looked, sedated in the hospital bed.

He was just starting to emerge from the haze of drugs when one day she walked in and he began to cry. His heart rate jumped, she said, and a doctor asked her to leave.

She didn't know what to think.

"I was just afraid that he wasn't going to want to see me and didn't want me in his life," she said.

She had gone back to the guest house when Adam's mother called.

"We need you over here," she said his mother told her.

"I'm only coming if Adam asks for me," Carrie said.

"Yes, he's asking for you," his mother replied.

To this day, Carrie said, neither she nor Adam is sure why he was upset. "I don't know if it was because he didn't want me to see him that way or he was upset that he wouldn't be able to take care of me. I don't know."

Adam recovered quickly. He said he never wondered if she still loved him. He knew she did.

In January, he and his wife moved into a new house in Thurmont near her parents, finally beginning their married lives together.

"It's an adjustment," she said.

Sometimes, in a restaurant, she must help him cut his steak. But then he will go race around on his ATV, which terrifies her.

They know they have seen much more than most couples in their first months of marriage. "I figure if we can make it through this one, we're smooth sailing for the rest of however long," she said.

* * *

At night, after all the visitors were gone from his hospital room, Joey Bozik would think about his girlfriend. He was coming to terms with what the land mine had done to his body, and most of the time he felt happy to be alive.

But how happy would she be with a man who had lost both legs and an arm?

"Is Jayme going . . . to want to stay with me?" he recalled wondering. "Is she going to want this lifestyle?"

They had to talk about it, and he knew he had to offer her an out. She knew it, too.

"I knew that he was eventually going to tell me that I could go," she recalled. "He was just that kind of guy."

And that pained her, she said, because she didn't want him to doubt her even for a moment.

She recalled that they had the talk right before Thanksgiving of 2004 in his fourth-floor hospital room.

"Why do you want to stay with me?" she said he asked. "Why would you want to stay with me?"

She began to cry.

"I pretty much told him that I loved him," she said. "I was willing to be with him the rest of my life if he would let me."

They were married Dec. 31, 2004, in a hospital chapel. Sitting in a wheelchair, he looked tired but happy. He wore a dark jacket with a red boutonniere and had his wedding ring on a thin chain around his neck. She wore a lacy white dress and veil. They had cake and flowers and played a CD of wedding music she bought at a local bookstore. "It was a good time," she said.

Since then, their lives in Mologne House, the hospital's long-term recovery residence for the most seriously wounded, have been filled with adjustments to the new reality.

As Joey recovered, was fitted for three artificial limbs and underwent months of physical rehabilitation, she did the laundry, the shopping, the scheduling, the driving. For a time, she had to open his sodas, help button his shirts and arrange things so he could bathe himself without asking for assistance.

She watched him undergo his exhausting therapy and got him dinner. They were together a lot. Sometimes they both looked drained. She had to be careful not to do everything for him. "He wants his own dignity, his pride," she said. And he had to learn to ask for her help.

Last month, after nearly a year and a half of recovery, they left Mologne House for good and headed back to North Carolina.

They packed Joey's spare artificial legs in a big blue sports bag and, helped by a visiting high school pal, Martin Wysocki, began loading their belongings into a trailer hooked to their Nissan out in the parking lot.

Waiting in their third-floor room, Joey seemed pensive as Jayme taped the last boxes. A warm breeze blew the curtains. The TV chattered. The erasable wall calendar on which she had logged much of their lives had been wiped clean.

When it was time to go, he slipped on the artificial legs with the hydraulic knees, adjusted the suction in the camo-colored sockets and headed for the lobby in his electric wheelchair.

She slung a courier bag over her shoulder, grabbed his two canes and went to the front desk to pay their $1.22 phone bill. "This is the beginning of the next stage of our lives," she said.

Outside, Joey backed the wheelchair up the trailer ramp and stood unsteadily. Jayme stepped to help him, handed him a cane and guided him down the ramp.

She climbed in the driver's seat, and as he maneuvered to the passenger side, he sang, "I got some spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle."

Then, under a clear blue sky, they drove away.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company