Memorial Day: My family, like many, has bled for ideals that both withstood history's judgment, and not

Third-class Petty Officer Felton Mims in Vietnam

Memorial Day.

Today, we honor those who have died in battle, and those who carry their wounds, physical, mental and spiritual, among us today.

Always, it seems, when we send our young to war, it's it for the best of reasons -- at least, they seem so, at the time the bullets fly and bombs are dropped.

But history judges our wars, unearths their motivations, and renders its verdicts.

On this Memorial Day, I am sharing parts of a blog I wrote several years ago about generations of my own family's wartime sacrifices:
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From the American Revolution through the Civil War, World Wars I and II, to Vietnam and, I presume, even today, Mimses have served in uniform. 

Three Mimses are on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., cousins, black and white, who died in combat on the ground and in the air.

Air Force Capt. George Mims, of Manning, S.C., was shot down over North Vietnam in December 1965, never to be heard from again, an MIA eventually declared dead in 1973. His body was never recovered.

Third-class Petty Officer Felton Mims, a Texan, drowned in Go Cong Province, while serving on a Navy river patrol boat in March 1969. (That's him in the photo above, getting a haircut from a crewmate).

Army PFC Kenneth Mims, from Alabama, died when stepped on a land mine as he and other members of the B Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry, 101^st Airborne Division patrolled near Thua Thien in April 1971.

Four of my uncles served and survived, albeit with nightmares, the crucible that was World War II in the Pacific.

Two Mimses fought the British, another fought for them, in the American Revolution.

The Civil War killed relatives by the dozens, North and South, white and black. It directly affected my line of the family, with my great-grandfather, wounded as a Confederate private, was left crippled and dependent on morphine before he died, leaving my 7-year-old grandfather and his mother destitute.

His poverty and an austere upbringing by an older brother haunted him, and by extension my own father, who struggled with a distant, demanding relationship with his Dad.

To a far lesser extent, I experienced some of the same in my early years, before a mild heart attack left my dad more engaged -- just in time for my critical teen years. (note: My Dad died on Jan. 17,2019, at age 96).

The victims of war enrich the soil of American cemeteries, where the young dead gradually rejoin the earth from which the first humans sprang, appearing from the primordial mists of creation. The victims of war who live on color the lives of their ancestors -- for good, and for ill.

Still, on this day I am quietly, thoughtfully grateful to those who fought, and sometimes died for their principles and country. . . and those who survived the crucible to continue my family's journey through the life of the worlds to come.

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P.S. (Thanks to my cousin, Marilyn -- comment below -- also learned of Seaman Robert Lang Mims, who died in the Pearl Harbor attack on the U.S.S. Arizona. Sobering to think his remains are entombed still below the Pacific's waves).