Thank you everyone. I think of Memorial Day as more generic...to remember refugees, families, the living, the dead..of disaster as well as war..or just our own deceased. I went to a great program at Folklife by Hank Cramer, retired Army Colonel and great singer (he has a new album out of songs sung by soldiers) and he had some Hmong people with him and he told us more than I had known about their bravery, which I will report elsewhere. Also, fate brought me to Olympia right at the time the regular ceremony was ending so I went to the Vietnam memorial there, which is very nice...and they had a very nice ceremony...I slipped the MC a note and said please to also remember the Hmong, and Australians and everyone else I could remember...and also those who served in Guam, Phillipines, Japan (the nurses who pulled the maggots out of the wounded) and the USA.

Hank mentioned the Scottish tradition, which again I had not heard of..of soldiers before battle giving the piper their favorite pipe tune so he could pipe their spirits back to Scotland, since their bodies would remain on the battlefield. Later, in introducing some Hmong musicians, they essentially said the same thing was done by their people. Interesting..possibly universal...but I had not heard of it before.

mg