This weekend we celebrate Memorial Day here in the US. Memorial Day unofficially marks the beginning of Summer (my favorite season). Retailers will tell you to shop, as Memorial Day sales are the biggest of the year, second only to the almighty Black Friday. You will see deals everywhere, the largest ones, from clothing to electronics. You will receive emails from every online business and newsletter to take advantage of this once a year opportunity.
Be American. Remember the fallen. Go shopping.
The thing is that Memorial Day is not meant to be a happy-go shopping day. Memorial Day is a day to remember the people who died while serving the country’s armed forces. Because of its global impact and the number of American lives lost, Memorial Day became more common after World War 2. It started as Decoration Day back in the times of the American Civil War when families decorated the graves of fallen soldiers from the war. Eventually, it transformed to Memorial Day after World War 2, and it became a federal holiday in 1968.
More than 1 million Americans have died in wars fought by the US military since the American Revolutionary War. 54,246 American soldiers died in the Korean War. One of them was Tomas Martinez Candelario, my grandfather.
The Korean War is often known as the forgotten war because, well, nobody knows anything about it. Fought between World War 2 and Vietnam, the Korean War was a conflict that spawned from the aftermath of World War 2 and it still going on to this day. Although the Korean peninsula is currently not engaged in active combat, they are still at war because no peace treaty was ever signed, only a cease-fire was negotiated.
My grandfather of the 65th Inf. Regt Company “B,” disappeared on July 17th, 1953, ten days before the armistice was signed to end the fight. The soldiers must have known the war was about to end because the last time he spoke to my grandmother, he told her the war was ending and he was coming home. He was last seen charging up Hill 433, near the town of Sinmok-Tong in North Korea, in the face of heavy artillery from Chinese Communist troops entrenched in fortified bunkers. It is said that there were prisoners up the hill and their mission was to rescue them and seize control of the hill. He was posthumously awarded the silver star for his actions on that day.
I grew up thinking my grandfather was missing in action; they never found his body, and there wasn’t an official confirmation of his death. An empty burial plot was kept in his honor hoping that one day he would be returned home. My grandmother would tell stories on how she would dream that he was alive and had returned home but with a Korean wife and kids. He became a legend, always spoken about during family gatherings where the very few that knew him would share stories about him. Unfortunately, my grandmother is the only one currently carrying his living memory, as those other members of the family that once knew him had passed on.
Although he is the root of my last name, Martinez, I know very little about him. I don’t know who he was or where does he come from. I don’t know his extended family or other relatives. I don’t know the history of my last name and how the Martinez came to Puerto Rico. My father, obviously, didn’t get to know him either because he was only six months old when he died. I’m not sure how he looked like either. I have seen only two photos of him including the one above. My grandmother says that my cousin looks a lot like him, so there is that reference, but besides that, my grandfather lives only in my grandmother’s memory while the rest of us have created an imaginary character in our minds of who we think he was.
I do know why he joined the Army. Puerto Rico’s economy in the late 40’s and 50’s was in the gutter. Many Puerto Ricans fled the island during this time and emigrated to the mainland United States, most notably New York City. In the hopes of having a better paying job, my grandfather along with many hundreds of other Puerto Ricans joined the Army at a time of war to be able to support their families.
In 2010 my son Jasper was born. When we had to register him for his birth certificate Rachel, and I had already decided on Jasper for a name but hadn’t given much thought to his middle name. I was filling in the information while Jasper and Rachel slept in the hospital bed. It dawned on me that this baby right in front me will carry the Martinez name inherited from a man I never knew. I decided then to have Tomas be his second name to honor my grandfather. Unlike me, my son would get to know his grandfather very well (my father thank goodness is alive and well). He would spend time with him, play with him, talk to him, and get to know him and have a sense of his family roots. My older brother does not have children. Therefore Jasper is currently the only boy in the family carrying the Martinez name forward.
In 2004 the US Army contacted my grandmother and told her his remains might have been found, but they needed DNA samples to confirm them. They have just recently taken the DNA samples, and we are waiting to see if they are a match. If the samples do match, he’d finally be coming home after 65 years.
I know this has nothing to do with Japanese Calligraphy, Zen, or martial arts but I figured I would share a story about a fallen soldier this Memorial Day weekend instead of polluting your inbox with another Memorial Day sale. I do want to do some summer special for some stuff I have in my store, but that would have to wait for another weekend.