Editor’s Choice: Memorial Day Reading

We’ve had a lot of good writing in Audere Magazine about Memorial Day; here in New York, it is really too cold and rainy for a cookout, but maybe somewhere in the rest of the country, while you are enjoying your burgers, you might take a moment to think about the military men and women who gave their lives to let you have the freedom to grill your burgers in the backyard.

In 2019, Steven S. Drachman asked us to remember a couple of his ancestors who gave their lives in the Revolutionary War. It is startling to think that many soldiers have died for our freedoms and are not remembered today by a single soul. “This Memorial Day,” he wrote, “I’m remembering two ancestors of mine, who seem heroic and larger-than-life, but who are memorialized only in a little family history book, which I found with my grandmother’s possessions, after her death.”

Take a look, and pause a moment to think of Samuel Ward and Samuel Ward Jr., a father and son, both dead in an American War.

Our old friend Alan N. Levy, himself now gone for two years, wrote a terrific reflection on Memorial Day shortly before his death, asking us to leave partisanship behind when we remember soldiers who died protecting us. “When Ronald Reagan was our president,” he wrote, “I was proud to be an American.  When Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office, I was proud to be an American. And whether our president was named Truman, Eisenhower, Clinton, Obama, or Trump, I have been proud to be an American.”

Have a good Memorial Day, friends.

^^^

Photo by Tazzanderson, Pixabay.

Alan N. Levy, who died in 2019, was the author of the geo-political thriller, The Tenth Plague, which Kirkus Reviews called “a bombastic and cinematic thriller … A fleet and dramatic … tale of global conflict.” The novel is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local bookstore. Steven S. Drachman is the author of The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is published by Chickadee Prince Books.