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As we honor our lost veterans this month, I am reminded of those among my family and friends who never came back from their war service. To honor their ultimate sacrifice, I found it was important, and rewarding, to seek opportunities to learn about and share their unique, impactful stories. When I was in college, I videotaped elderly members of my family who shared their reminisces of personal experiences from earlier wars and the losses they endured from them.
This is a theme I reliably returned to when asked to speak at Memorial Day events. I urged those attending a Memorial Day ceremony to engage with their close friends and loved ones with the hopes of learning something new about veterans they knew who were lost while serving. At a minimum, sharing these perspectives may be a helpful coping mechanism for those involved which could enable healing and a fuller appreciation of the friends or loved ones they lost.
This type of challenge could also be directed at students who might embrace a more appreciative view of Memorial Day’s meaning. In effect, instructors have certain tools which they can consider when interacting with both veteran and civilian students or, similarly, with their work colleagues. These tools involve a more pedagogical approach that relies on inquiry. Instructors could expand the understanding of the meaningfulness of Memorial Day by using the Socratic method, asking a series of questions and ensuring that their students may learn through the use of critical thinking, reason, and logic.
One classroom exercise could involve students learning about the background and experiences of a fallen veteran. There are thousands of compelling stories to be learned in the biographies provided at https://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/. Similarly, you may have heard of the Story Corps (https://storycorps.org), whose mission is to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” Story Corps has a page called the “Military Voices Initiative,” which “provides a platform for veterans, service members, and military families to share their unique and compelling stories. In doing so we honor their voices, amplify their experiences, and let them know that we — as a nation — are listening.” There is also, from the Library of Congress, a web tool called the “The Veterans History Project,” which is a part of their mission to “offer classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library’s vast digital collections in their teaching.”
A personal-favorite instructional resource I have utilized when preparing speeches is also a valuable tool for instructors wishing to bring discussions about Memorial Day into the classroom. The “Veterans Legacy Program” run by the VA claims they offer “educators an integrated new suite of lesson plans designed to teach students about the service and sacrifice of our nation’s veterans, and to take advantage of our national cemeteries as historic places for teaching and learning.” The website provides lesson plans which focus on Memorial Day and also seek to expand our appreciation of what our veterans cemeteries have to offer.
Whereas discussing the biographies of our nation’s fallen veterans can be a rewarding experience in the classroom, so may a discussion of our state and national cemeteries, where so many are buried. The VA offers that “each national cemetery has its own history and unique landscape, with geography, design, and nature worthy of reflection.” An instructor choosing this topic ahead of Memorial Day may enable opportunities to localize an enhanced appreciation of our nation’s fallen. For example, there are two national cemeteries each an hour by car from my home in Florida. Each has its own unique history and a roster of esteemed residents, and I trust all national cemeteries will host a ceremony this Memorial Day weekend.
Now more than ever, the prescience and meaningfulness of such discussions and resulting memorialization of our fallen veterans should be considered in the classroom. Especially so, with the presence and growth of student veterans who served after 9/11 and are currently using their GI Bill® benefits. Also adding to this topic’s prescience, every year, we are losing more and more veterans who served with our fallen heroes and have many poignant stories to share. Consider that a Pew study noted that VA projections suggest the number of living veterans will continue to decline over the next 25 years. By 2046, they estimate there will be around 12.5 million veterans, a decrease of about 35% from current numbers. By that time, Gulf War-era veterans are projected to make up a majority of those who served, and most veterans who served in the Vietnam era or earlier will have died.”
I hope you might be convinced there is an urgency behind choosing to expand the discussion on this topic in the classroom. There are also cathartic benefits for veterans to consider.
And I also hope you’ll consider this long holiday weekend an excerpt from Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak”: “They say, We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning.”
