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Health & Fitness

Memorial Day - Someone Else's Children

Some thoughts on Memorial Day.

If the death of a youth seems needless, how much sense does a battlefield casualty make? How about a “friendly fire” battle casualty? Can we find any meaning in that?

Bari.

It’s a southern Italian port on the Adriatic Sea that the Allies used for supplies during World War II. On the night of December 2, 1943, about fifty Liberty ships were moored in the harbor, waiting to be unloaded. One of them, the USS John Harvey, had a cargo of mustard gas, which had been outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

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That night, the German Luftwaffe conducted a twenty-minute air raid that became known as “Little Pearl Harbor”. More than two thousand troops and civilians were killed; most by the Germans, but some by friendly fire from the defending shore guns, some from the friendly fire of the unleashed top-secret nerve gas chemicals.

The Allies weren’t supposed to have the chemicals for the gas, but the fear was that the Axis might use mustard gas; so those containers were sitting in the hold of the John Harvey, “just in case.”

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The fact that the John Harvey contained mustard gas - and that some of this gas had been released during the raid and had killed U.S. sailors - was covered up for fear of “retaliation” in case the Germans should happen to hear about it..

Doctors examining the afflicted servicemen noticed that odd things were happening. Why were the sailors’ white blood cells dying? This peaked their curiosity, which led them to discover that they had been exposed to the mustard gas. Which led to more research.

In 1981, a boy was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia ten days before his third birthday. Leukemia is cancer of the blood; an overabundance of white blood cells. He was treated, went into remission, and grew as big as a linebacker.

Part of his treatment – and for millions of others - was vincristine, a chemotherapeutic agent made from an alkaloid from the Madagascar periwinkle, a poison plant. The same type of plant used in the making of mustard gas.

The boy’s father – who was always afraid of giving blood – had his consciousness raised when his child became ill. The young children in his son’s oncology ward would undergo painful spinal taps in a separate room.

The man’s three year old son would return to his bed and, as his tears dried, would immediately resume playing with his Matchbox cars. If his young son could demonstrate such pluck, why was his father afraid of a little pinch in the arm?

The father began to donate blood on a regular basis - even after his son went into remission. Some of that blood supply was shipped to the troops in Desert Storm in the early 1990's - on ripples that had started in Bari decades before.

That should have been the end of the story. Except that that act of sacrifice by someone else’s children at Bari raises a lot of questions.

How many people have survived cancer due to the sacrifice of those sailors and merchant mariners? How many of those cancer survivors are even aware of what happened at Bari?

What words of consolation can we give to the parents and spouses and children and lovers and descendants of those troops? Is the fact that the loss of their lives meant the saving of so many other lives consolation enough? What could anyone offer, beyond a simple, “thank you”?

What kind of lives - what kind of contributions - could those fallen heroes have made, had they lived? How many Einsteins; how many Martin Luther Kings; how many Marie Curies or Jonas Salks or Abraham Lincolns was humanity cheated of? It underscores the full impact of the Jewish saying, "a loss to one is a loss to all".

If and when our leaders have to consider the necessity of sending troops into combat, will they be troubled by the same questions? As the people who elected them, will we trouble them with those questions?

There are no good wars, but there are necessary wars and then there are useless wars. When we see our troops on the news, we take for granted that they're in harm's way. They're there as volunteers - there's no draft. We should try to remember that there are mortal, fragile human beings under the helmets and camouflage.

Because they're not "someone else's children" - they're our children.

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