Honor our fallen but also remember those who mourn them still, or still feel the guilt

Memorial Day — that hallowed day when we remember and honor the men and increasingly women who gave their lives in service during hundreds of years of U.S. wars — carries special burdens for some who didn’t die in combat.

The survivor’s guilt for wartime comrades who came home thinking, “Why them, not me?”– guilt that can last a lifetime and contribute to combat veterans’ post-traumatic stress disorder. The special heartache felt by loved ones who can never again hold, see, grow old with their fallen family members — the baby boy who will never know his father; the spouse whose marriage seemed but a blink of an eye before war ended it; the mother who could never — and who never did — stop grieving.

When remembering our fallen warriors tomorrow, take a moment to think about all those who may still suffer the guilt, grief, personal loss. Visit the Cleveland Gold Star Families Memorial Monument at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 10701 East Boulevard, dedicated in 2018, or the Gold Star Families Memorial on Columbia Road in York Township in Medina County, dedicated in 2016.

The Cleveland Gold Star Families Memorial Monument at its dedication Aug. 31, 2018, at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Cleveland. The black granite monument bears the words “Gold Star Families Memorial Monument, a tribute to Gold Star Families and Relatives who have sacrificed a Loved One for our Freedom” on one side. The other side has four granite panels dedicated to homeland, family, patriot and sacrifice. (Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer) The Plain Dealer

The veteran behind these Gold Star Families monuments and scores of others around the country is 97-year-old Hershel “Woody” Williams, the last surviving World War II Marine recipient of the Medal of Honor. Giving back. Remembering. Honoring.

In a February 2020 article on military.com about Williams and other Marine survivors of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima meeting to mark the battle’s 75th anniversary, Williams described the indescribable. He spoke about what he felt when he later learned that two of the four Marine riflemen covering him in 1945 as he repeatedly advanced on enemy positions to disable them with flamethrowers and other arms — the subject of his Medal of Honor — had died in the effort.

“Once I found out that this happened, this Medal of Honor took on a different significance,” Williams said, as quoted by Richard Sisk of military.com. “I said, from that point on, it does not belong to me. It belongs to them. I wear it in their honor. I keep it shined for them, because there is no greater sacrifice than when someone sacrifices their life for you and me.”

Honoring. Remembering. Giving back.

When the Cleveland Gold Star Families Memorial Monument was about to be dedicated nearly three years ago, Sheila Nowacki — whose 24-year-old son, Andrew “Ace” Nowacki, a Marine lance corporal, was killed in Iraq in 2005 — told Plain Dealer reporter Brian Albrecht of the comfort the monument would give her. Not just because it would help others remember and honor her son, but also because they could do so in company with the Gold Star families, grieving together for their lost loved ones.

Many of us have holes in our family trees — the uncle, the cousin, the in-law who never married, who never had a chance to live a full life because of war. Think about them tomorrow. But even more of us, if we look closely enough, have forebears, possibly including fathers and grandfathers, scarred by their experiences of combat — by seeing comrades die, by feeling somehow unworthy in surviving where so many others fell. These are injuries both visible and invisible.

As the nation marked the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War a decade ago, volunteers in Bath Township in Summit County researched the township’s nearly 150 Civil War veterans. Bath Township Museum Administrator Lee Darst told The Plain Dealer’s Elizabeth Sullivan at the time that the number of local veterans wasn’t surprising — comparable to other townships that had to meet a “volunteer” quota during the four years of the war.

But what did surprise her and the other researchers, she said, was “how many of the men never married or never had children.” Some adopted, but Darst speculated that either the trauma of the war itself, or the rampant diseases to which the soldiers were exposed, or both, “profoundly impacted these veterans’ lives.”

Remembering. Giving back. Honoring.

So tomorrow, amid the parades, visits to the graves of loved ones, family outings or barbecues, take time to honor and remember all our nation’s fallen. But also give some thought to the contingent casualties of their sacrifices, to recall in their full scope the trauma and losses of all our wars and fallen warriors.

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