By Staff Reports
Heroes were honored Sunday during the annual Twilight Ceremony at Patrick Memorial Gardens.
“Memorial Day is a most sacred time, as we remember our brothers and sisters in arms who are no longer with us,” American Legion Commander Clyde Thomas said during the ceremony that was sponsored by the American Legion Post 105, VFW Post 7800, VFW Post 8467, and the Patrick County Veterans Memorial Honor Guard.
There are thousands who fell on the battlefields of Europe, the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam. Others, he said, gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the global war on terrorism.
“Still more, so many more, returned home to live out their lives in the country for which they fought for so unselfishly,” he said. Although many have passed on, “we pause by each of their gravestones to salute their military service, too.
“This Memorial Day we are honoring the nation’s men and women currently serving in uniform, past veterans, and above all, those who made the supreme sacrifice for liberty here and around the world,” Thomas said.
In the United States, Memorial Day started out as Decoration Day. It was first celebrated sometime during or shortly after the Civil War, Lt. Col. Douglas E. Dunlap said.
While many towns and cities claim to be the birthplace of Decoration Day, “the one thing about Memorial Day that all historians agree to is that the first Decoration Day was not sponsored by any government, civic organization, or veteran’s group, north or south,” Dunlap said.
Harless Belcher, a member of the American Legion, attended the event.
Instead, it was an effort by the mothers, widows, and daughters of the dead to remember the soldiers, honor their service and sacrifice, and decorate their graves with flags and flowers, he added.
The practice of Memorial Day did not gain in popularity until General John A. Logan, a Union combat veteran and the Commander-in-Chief of The Grand Army, “issued a proclamation calling for a ‘Decoration Day’ to be recognized and observed in all U.S. states and territories” on May 5, 1868, Dunlap said.
The holiday was officially observed for the first time on Saturday, May 30, 1868, and the name changed to Memorial Day in 1967.
“Every May, all across this great land, members of the active-duty military, veterans’ organizations, civic organizations, the Boy Scouts, and the Girl Scouts place flags and flowers on the graves of our honored dead, just like those women, whose names are forever lost to history did more than 155 years ago,” Dunlap said.
There are parades, gatherings in town squares, at war memorials, and in cemeteries to remember and honor those who gave their lives in defense of our country, he said.
“I like to think that most Americans, even those who did not take part in a Memorial Day observance, did, at least take a few moments to remember those veterans who made it possible for us to gather together, to express our opinions freely and without fear, to worship as we see fit, and to honor them and this great nation for which they died,” Dunlap said.
Honor guard member Richard Cox said that while some veterans bear visible signs on their service such as a missing limb or a look in their eye, others may carry the evidence inside them.
“A pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg, or perhaps another sort of inner steel, the soul’s ally forged in the refinery of adversity,” he said.
One can’t tell a veteran by looking, Cox said as except in parades the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem.
“He is an ordinary, and yet an extra ordinary, human being. A person who offered some of his life’s most vital years in the service of his country and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs,” Cox said. “He went away one person and came back another – or didn’t come back at all. He is the parade-riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.
He is the three anonymous heroes in the Tomb of the Unknowns.”
The presence of the tomb in Arlington National Cemetery “must forever preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor dies unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean’s sunless deep,” Cox said.
The Patrick County Veterans Memorial Honor Guard attended 20 funerals in 2020. American Legion Treasurer Gary Griffith said the organization sold 14 luminaries in honor of living veterans and 52 in honor of deceased veterans.
To donate, mail contributions to P.O. Box 77, Woolwine, VA, 24185, or for more information, call Thomas at (276) 930-2117.
