Dedicated With Deepest Respect and Honor
Wounded Knee-WWI-WWII-Korea-Viet Nam-Persian Gulf-Bosnia
and All Other ConflictsRainBear's Warriors
Eulogy delivered at Native American funeral services at the Moving Wall: Lancaster, PA 1994;
Lebanon, PA; Milton, PA ; and York, PA 1995They lived with a predator.
Sometimes the predator was their own fear. They lived in a dimension called loneliness. Loneliness - that was another predator. Lost youths. Lost wisdom. Lost energies. Unfulfilled dreams, all part of that dimension called loneliness. Children left behind never knowing their fathers. Fathers dying alone never seeing their children. We asked for their strengths, we asked for their courage. They put aside their prejudice, they put aside their angers, they put aside their technological societies. They traded their lost youth, their goals and their dreams.
They asked their god, their creator, for one more day. Sometimes he heard, but as the names here today show, over 58.000 times he didn't. Why not? we ask. But why not is the question that has always been asked. Whether for the Armies of Ghengas Kahn, Crazy Horse, General Swartzkoff or all those in between, we ask, Why didn't he hear? Why!
Strength of honor, strength of heart, the strength to know that those honored on the Wall and remembered by their loved ones did not die in vain. Their heart of hearts carried them through the turmoil, through changes, through conflicts, a war that should not have been, with all too real results. Faceless names, devoid of race, devoid of creed - just honorable warriors. Walk their talk and don't forget them. Only in their mother's hearts and their father's souls can they hug them again. They thundered through a steaming jungle, they call each other brother, they called each other son. Was it a good day to fight? Was it a good day to die? Their spirits remain forever with all the other faceless names of warriors of times gone by and times yet to be.
I didn't hear the report of the rifles. I did see the coffin glide gently into the cold damp Pennsylvania ground, and even my entreaties to the God of War, the God of Mercy, and other lesser deities did not stay the coffin's course. It settled, pulling in with it part of our youth.
After the parents were given their multicolored cloth child surrogate from a grateful nation, they gathered paused in their grief. All the young Captains and Lieutenants of Marines, the young lions, the destroyers of worlds yet undefined, drifted apart and stared out into the sun dappled cemetery. We couldn't cry, we couldn't touch, and for some there were no more tears left anyway.
We parted to our various destinies, some to go back, some never to return.
The coffin stayed.
And now politicians admit mistakes!
It is not enough. It never will be.
They listened to the voices of light, they listened to the howls of darkness, they listened to the thunder of their hearts. Did we hear their cries? Where are their spirits today? Bring them from that dimension called loneliness, bring them from that dimension called sorrow. Honor their memories.
Go here for a tribute to Viet Nam Veteran's Moving Wall