Published: December 05, 2008 12:05 am      

There’s more than one Day of Remembrance

A tall gentleman with a beard and a weathered face, wearing a long black coat and a stovepipe hat, rode in a horse-drawn carriage near the head of the parade.

I’d met him earlier that day, and he said he was a Vietnam-era Veteran. He and his carriage sat there for some time, the procession having stopped because of a small drama playing out less than 50 yards behind him.

Someone was kneeling over one of the marchers, pumping energetically on his chest in an instantly recognizable act of merciful intent. You can tell when it’s being done for real; there’s an urgency that differs it from a practice session.

When I’d seen it done one other time, it had failed. My prayer for someone I will never meet was that this time, there would be better results. An ambulance worked its way back toward the scene.

“They’ve sent for his family,” someone said. Somebody else told us his wife had been watching when it happened, and another said, “Thank God there was a medic nearby when he dropped.”

Word filtered up to us that, “He was gone, but they were able to shock him and bring him back.” We heard he was in his late 50s and had no history of heart trouble. The ambulance pulled away, the parade resumed and we were left to wonder how it would end. The next day’s news was that the outlook was hopeful.

My new friend in the stovepipe hat and his carriage moved out, and the rest of the Remembrance Day Parade came past. It was the observance of the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.

Folks think of the Union Army wearing blue and the Confederate Army wearing gray, but it’s not that simple. Re-enactors in the 96th Pennsylvania (one of my cousins served in it) wore the standard bluebelly uniform, but the New York Zouaves did not.

Today, some might mistake the Zouaves for Shriners or Masons, but their fancy, multi-colored uniforms with pantaloons, fezzes and splashes of red were a source of pride for these soldiers. The originals were New York Fire Zouaves, a fireman’s brigade that enlisted en masse and brought its uniforms along.

A green-clad group represented Berdan’s Sharpshooters, expert marksmen serving under Col. Hiram Berdan, who before the Civil War was acclaimed the nation’s best rifle shot. They were equipped with Sharps rifles ... which is how they got the name: They were Sharps shooters.

Along came a small contingent of re-enactors symbolizing what the engraving on certain headstones in Arlington National Cemetery refers to as U.S.C.T.: United States Colored Troops.

My friend Gary and I knew what they represented and stepped forward, applauding for them. Soon, everyone around us was cheering ... and they may have been the only unit in the parade to draw such a reaction.

Men like them, in uniforms like theirs, formed the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that wrote a significant installment in the story of American valor at the battle of Battery Wagner in South Carolina. Against nearly hopeless odds, they assaulted a strongly fortified Confederate position with such bravery that there could no longer be any doubt about the worth of black troops. News of what they did inspired a wave of enlistment in the Union Army.

Their descendants would be called Buffalo Soldiers, men who distinguished themselves on the plains of the American West and later in the Spanish-American War, where they were the first American troops to reach the crest of San Juan Hill. Today, people like them are known simply as American soldiers.

Behind them walked their wives, also dressed in period costume, and alongside was another figure I recognized immediately. I tipped my hat to him and said, “Mr. Douglass.” He looked back at me and nodded, and what I saw in his eyes spoke to me with a fierce pride and eloquence that could have matched anything the real Frederick Douglass might have said or written.

Douglass was a freed slave and abolitionist who was the first African-American invited to an inaugural event held for a President of the United States — Abraham Lincoln, who had welcomed him before to the White House and become his friend. Next month, America will inaugurate its first African-American president. I am certain that Douglass and Lincoln will be there to watch.

Eventually, the Confederates began passing in review. A few of them stayed in rooms near ours, and in the mornings we met outside the motel office, where coffee was brewing. They and my friends (who dress as Union re-enactors) and I had one thing in common — something we shared with everyone in the parade and all of the historical figures they represented: Regardless of the garments we wore, the color of our skins, or the homelands of our ancestors, we were Americans.

I don’t go to Gettysburg as a tourist, but because a vital chapter in our history was written there, one that dramatically shaped the country I love.

For the same reasons, I hope someday to visit Hawaii because of what happened there 67 years ago today.

I want to stand in the USS Arizona Memorial and look down into the water to see the fuel oil seeping out of the sunken battleship, and to see where Victor Tambolleo’s name is engraved on the memorial wall. Once a Cumberland resident, he rests today with the rest of his shipmates who never came home.

My friend Charles Logsdon of Keyser, W.Va., survived the attack that claimed Tambolleo’s life and those of more than 2,300 other Americans. When I see him at our Lions Club meetings, I see a national treasure.

What he reminds me of means as much today as it did on Dec. 7, 1941:

Remember Pearl Harbor!