When I was a young kid, Memorial Day was known as Decoration Day. People remembered deceased war veterans by attending parades, and by going to cemeteries to decorate graves with flags and flowers. My Grandmother always made the trek to the cemetery to tend to the graves of her family, but was never able to do that for her youngest brother, because he went to serve in WWII, and never returned.
I remember her showing me a box full of old letters and post cards he had sent her while they kept in touch. They abruptly ended, and were followed by a string of Western Union telegrams from the War Dept. that notified her that he was Missing in Action. That went on for several weeks, and she told me all the family could do was hope and pray that he was still alive. Then finally, there was the letter that informed her of their investigation, and interviews with fellow soldiers. Eyewitness accounts confirmed that his position had taken a direct hit from a bomb, and no remains were recovered.
These WWII veterans endured things we can't even imagine. Almost all of them are gone now, but of those I knew, most never even mentioned the horrors of war. They did their duty, and returned home and somehow put all of the ugliness aside. I recall one tough old guy I worked with who was a WWII Veteran. He only mentioned his military service once in all the time I knew him. We were stringing the cable through a large 60 ton crane burden block, and he was standing on the bed of a large flat-bed truck feeding the new cable through the sheaves. While pulling, he lost his footing when the cable suddenly came free, and he tumbled backwards off of the high truck bed. It was like watching an Olympic gymnast doing a dismount as he turned in mid-air, and he deftly landed and rolled onto the concrete. He jumped up, dusted himself off, and remarked that while falling in mid-air, his WWII Paratrooper training immediately came back to him. I can still see the big grin on his face, where most people would have been laying on the concrete in pain from broken bones.
