Honor Guards : For Those Touched by War, Memorial Day Is Chance to Remember

In Southern California, Memorial Day marks the start of a sacred tradition: the beach season. Beer and Coppertone and wine coolers. Across the nation, it is a day of rest, of barbecues, of swimming pool glare.

But it was not always so.

The custom of decorating the graves of war dead with flowers started in Waterloo, N.Y., about a year after the Civil War ended. After World War I, Memorial Day became an occasion to honor anyone who had died in an American war, and eventually the tradition was expanded to include remembrance of all loved ones.

Memorial Day, also known as Decoration Day, came to be associated with small-town parades complete with drum majors, invocations and, of course, the gathering of veterans--Civil War veterans, then those who fought in the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Korea. Mothers led their children to graveyards, their arms full of flowers. A wreath was placed at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.

With the divisiveness of the Vietnam War, the day lost its significance for some. But even in Southern California, the land of reinvention and immigration, the original idea behind Memorial Day has not been lost entirely to the call of the ocean or the back yard. Some people still honor the original intent of the day: to remember those who died in war. What follows are the stories of seven Southern Californians who have much to remember.

My Buddy

Like many veterans of World War I, they often call each other “buddy.” Other times, it’s “honey.” This morning, Mary Emma Gregory Hallock, 93, and Winston M. Roche, 92, will be among the guests of honor on the podium for the Memorial Day ceremony at National Cemetery in Westwood.

Roche enlisted in the Army in March, 1917, and started out at the Presidio in San Francisco. After a brief stint in the cavalry and the coastal artillery, he was sent overseas with the Army’s Fifth Division. He was an engineer, digging trenches and putting up bridges wherever the front was. He was wounded by machine gun fire once, gassed twice.

By the time Roche came home from the Rhine in August, 1919, places and ordeals like Chateau-Thierry, Aisne-Marne, Saint-Mihiel and the Argonne Forest were a part of him.

Hallock completed her nurses’ training in Great Falls, Mont., in 1917, joined the Red Cross and was then recruited into the Army Nurse Corps on July 2, 1918. She was stationed at Camp Dodge, Iowa, the main receiving hospital for casualties from France. She put in 15-hour days in the operating room, working as a surgical nurse with amputees and caring for tuberculosis patients. Hallock contracted TB, which was not discovered until her departing physical in 1919. It took her 6 1/2 years to recover.

Now, Roche and Hallock both live in the San Fernando Valley. Roche and his wife live near enough that he has been able to keep an eye on Hallock in the 18 years since her husband died. He’s afraid she’ll fall. She’s hard of hearing and depends on him at times to interpret for her, just as he did one recent afternoon when they wove in and out of the past with their stories.

Active in the American Legion, Veterans of World War I and a number of other service organizations, Roche and Hallock have known each other since the 1950s. They go to veterans conventions together; the next one is in Visalia in June. Not many of their buddies show up these days.

“They’re all getting old, you know,” Hallock said.

Service and involvement have remained part of their lives, and they seem to thrive on it. During the past seven years, for example, Hallock has logged more than 1,000 hours of volunteer work at the Sepulveda VA Medical Center.

Hallock finally got overseas as an Army nurse in May, 1987. And Winston Roche was with her. They were among 18 World War I veterans honored by the French on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of America’s entry into the war. Roche received the French Medal of Honor; Hallock, the only woman in the group, received the Ordre National du Merite.

A good time was had by all. Roche, who went “45 days without a bath, change of clothes or drink of fresh water during the Argonne,” recounted with delight the details of the recent expedition: five champagne parties in two days, the lovely red and white tent in the ceremonial park, the best of everything. The French footed the whole bill.

“I’d love to go again,” Hallock said.

The group toured the old battlefields and sites, and Roche found himself back at the spot near Chateau-Thierry where he had once done night guard duty. He was a frightened kid with a gun, he said, whose commanding officer had told him just to shoot anything that moved. He shot at anything--cats, dogs, sounds.

“I got to stand on the same corner where I had guard duty that night. The bullet marks were still in the buildings. It was a thrill I can’t describe. I was just a kid. So scared.”

They remember. And on Memorial Days in particular, Hallock said, she has always thought of her grandfather, who “served in the Army of the Republic (during the Civil War and) who had to fight to save this country.”

The cemeteries always get to her, she said, especially in Europe. “When I saw those cemeteries with all those dead boys there, I thought, ‘Those mothers will never see their sons’ graves.’ ”

“It never fails,” Roche said of his recurring thoughts on Memorial Day. “How lucky I was to get through what I went through, and the terrible suffering we kids went through, and those who didn’t come home. How wonderful if my whole company had made it--we slept in the mud with each other, fought with each other, marched together. . . .”

A Silent Prayer

She served during “the forgotten one,” the Korean War. But Christa von Gerkan, brought to America from Germany “in rompers” in 1936 and adopted by German emigres here, does not forget--not the Korean War, not the great wars that divided and decimated her family in Germany, and, especially, not the fallen for whom Memorial Day was established.

An Air Force private involved in training recruits at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas during the Korean War, von Gerkan, who works at Hughes Aircraft, usually can be found at the Veterans Cemetery in Westwood on Memorial Day, attending services, sometimes standing in an honor guard with members of her AmVets post.

“Maybe it’s because these inalienable rights that we value so much were not just handed to me,” she said of the importance she attaches to remembering. It irritates and disturbs her that the observance is no longer held May 30, but, “for convenience,” is moved around to provide a long weekend. (In 1971 the federal holiday was changed to the last Monday in May.) It is losing its meaning, she said, and becoming just a day off.

“It’s for the fallen. We’re losing sight of why we are honoring the dead. I know the war was a long time ago. People want to forget. But that’s the danger.”

She became a citizen at 18, she said, and was recruited into the Air Force at 20. It is not, she said, that she is “a gung-ho flag-waver, but I have some very deep feelings about this country. It’s fantastic how this Constitution has held up.”

As active as she is in veterans organizations, it is not militarism that propels her. Anything but: “The reason my father emigrated here was that his father lost three sons in World War I. When he saw what was coming, he said, ‘No more sons for cannon fodder.’ And my mother came here after World War I because there were no men to marry in Germany. That generation was dead. . . . So when Memorial Day comes, I just say a silent prayer, ‘Let’s not have another.’ ”