c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ At a time when issues of death and dying preoccupy many Americans, Memorial Day presents itself as an opportunity for reflection on a particular kind of death _ those soldiers who, throughout the history of the United States, have risked death to defend their country.

Their deaths _ often far from the peaceful, painless”good”deaths that are the hot topic currently being debated _ present different issues for psychologists, ethicists and loved ones:

What is it like to die in the circumstances of war? Is the soul gripped by terror? Or does one experience pride and peace? And does dying during battle automatically qualify as a heroic death _ or does the nature of the war being fought make a difference?

These are among the haunting questions raised in the wake of war’s chaos that cultures seek to answer in their rites of memorialization of the war dead.

According to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of the City University of New York who has devoted his life to the study of war’s effects on the human condition, humanity is a”meaning-hungry species.””There is a desperate human need to find significance in death _ that’s the essence of any funeral ceremony. And Memorial Day especially, is one way to acknowledge and address deaths that have occurred in war.” But in the drive to find meaning in the deaths of individuals who have died in battle, Lifton warns”there is an easy tendency to glorify war deaths and therefore glorify war.”There can be a simplification or covering over of the mass murder that takes place in war and especially in modern war,”he said.

Arthur Egendorf, a psychologist and Vietnam War veteran who is an expert on war trauma, describes society’s inclination to glorify war as”memorializing by heroizing.” This can be seen in the films generated after each war, such as”The Dirty Dozen,””Twenty Seconds Over Tokyo”and the Rambo series. Little exists in the culture, he points out, that memorializes war in a more complex”theological, psychological or social sense.” Yet both Egendorf and Lifton say the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., represents a significant exception to this tendency.”In that black wall of names,”Lifton says,”there is no tendency at all to glorify war. There is a truth-telling about victims, and therefore about deaths. Yet it’s done with … dignity and a great respect for the dead.” Society, however, has been slower to find a lasting image for World War II. But through the recent dedication of the new Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, as well as plans for a World War II Memorial there, the country now seems ready to begin formally memorializing that war.

But to Lifton, the author of”Hiroshima in America: A Half-Century of Denial”(Putnam), there are”two levels”to take into consideration when remembering World War II. It cannot be memorialized fully, he believes, without also incorporating the”nuclear weapons dimension”represented by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

America’s resistance to such a process, Lifton believes, derives from”the historical fact that we dropped those bombs. It has to be said, that … we have simply been unable to look fully at all these dimensions because of the … uneasy sense that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were antithetical to our belief in ourselves as being a decent people.” The generation of Americans who lived through World War II”experienced it as a war against evil that had to be won _ and it did have to be won to save some sense of human freedom.”Thus, a”wave of joy”greeted the announcement of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Lifton says.

But it also meant Americans confused the war with the weapons and have not been able to confront the meaning of nuclear weapons.

Does delving into the country’s past and grappling with war’s carnage ultimately lead to pacifism?”One must be very cautious about taking a stand that allows one to support any war _ but it also means that one wants to work hard to take steps to prevent the need for endorsing any warlike behavior,”Lifton says.

It is precisely this kind of complex moral and ethical soul-searching that Egendorf says has been the legacy of Vietnam.

Egendorf, author of”Healing From the War”(Shambhala), however, laments the lack of patriotism today, especially where war is concerned.

It has been almost 30 years since the”last bulk of soldiers came home in a great wave”from Vietnam, he says, and”we don’t have much appreciation for the fact that so many of our human achievements were bought with the price of blood.”We have become so domesticated and comfort-addicted that we forget that it’s the willingness to make what’s been called the `supreme sacrifice’ that is one of the binding fibers of the cultural fabric. … None of the exalted virtues we proclaim as the `American Way’ came cheap.”

MJP END PEAY