Americans Approach Weekend Holiday With Two Different Moods

Americans laughed and cried, played and prayed, sang and stood silent on Sunday, midway through a Memorial Day holiday weekend with a split personality: part solemn commemoration and part kickoff to a summer of barbecues and beaches.

Memorial Day--now marked in most states on the last Monday in May, but in some on the traditional date of May 30--began as Decoration Day, a time for the graves of Civil War dead to be strewn with flowers.

The observance eventually was extended to all U.S. war dead. The three-day weekend also serves annually as the unofficial start to the season of swimming, back-yard cookouts and other summer fun.

After dawn Sunday, a small veterans’ group gathered for a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., a vanguard of the thousands of people expected at the site before tonight. Families strolled solemnly along the black wall etched with the names of U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen killed in Vietnam, pausing along the flower-strewn path to read messages left by those still mourning their dead.

“Missing you doesn’t get easier,” said one note signed “Di” and left to honor Army enlisted man Thomas M. Fitzpatrick, who was killed in 1969 at age 21.

“Some days the pain is worse than when I first lost you,” the note said. “There’s a part of me that died with you in Vietnam.”

Other planned Memorial Day observances on Sunday included a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra and the U.S. Army Chorus outside the Capitol and the dedication of Maryland’s new Korean War Memorial at Baltimore’s Canton Waterfront Park, honoring 525 Marylanders who died in the conflict.