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Published: May 26, 2010
Amy Condra

Next week Goochland will join the rest of the country in celebrating Memorial Day.

Memorial Day, for many of us, entails a three-day weekend, a chance to gather with friends and family for cookouts and camaraderie.

It’s easy to forget what the day is meant to celebrate, and what we are to remember.

I spent the past weekend with my father, a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, whose works as a combat artist recorded the stories of men and women who found themselves caught in harrowing circumstances.

In the painting below, a doctor stands in an operating room in a hospital in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Behind him young Navy corpsmen are doing immediate triage, assessing wounds suffered by troops during Operation Starlight, the first major offensive operation by U.S. Marines during the Vietnam War.

This doctor had interned at Bellevue Hospital in New York, and was now sharing a tent with my father, an engineer responsible for building an airstrip amidst villages specked with palm trees and rice paddies.

Surrounded by patients who were bloodied and broken, the doctor looked at my father and said, “I’m a psychiatrist, this is not my training.”

This man was, my father said, initially overwhelmed in the midst of the chaos that surrounded him. But then a Corpman called out, “We need you now, doctor.”

There is not, I have been told, always time to think too hard or too long during wartime; sometimes instinct is the prevailing response. 

And this doctor’s instinct told him to immediately turn around, and reach in, and start treating those who needed him.

That doctor, and those wounded, and everyone else who has ventured into terror to protect those of us who haven’t, so that we can sit back on a Monday off and savor the silence of peacetime, is what should be remembered next week.

We often forget that our country is still at war, that we are still sending young men and women abroad to fight our battles. 

One of those soldiers is Harrison Hankins, who was wounded in action this month while serving with the Marines in Afghanistan. He will be returning home to Goochland within a few weeks. 

Memorial Day is a time for us to honor his service and embrace his return. And to spare a few moments of gratitude for all those who have sustained the shock and despair of combat, so that the rest of us will never have to.

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