One life

On this Memorial Day, I remember a WWI soldier close to home

Sally’s great uncle, Harold Skinner, who died in World War I

IT WAS THE SUNDAY after the 9/11 attack on America. In the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial in France, I scanned the seemingly endless rows of white grave markers. Here lay the largest number of U.S. military dead from World War I: 14,246.

Nothing dilutes compassion more than numbers. It was all too far-reaching to comprehend.

If I told you that 116,516 Americans died in a war that ended more than a century ago, you might shake your head. If I told you that represented only a sliver of the 18 million who died in the four-year war you might feel disgust at man’s inhumanity to man.

But what would make you connect on a deeper emotional level wouldn’t be more large and incomprehensible numbers. It would be realizing that the grave I was standing beside that day belonged to Harold Skinner, a 19-year-old McMinnville kid who was my wife Sally’s great-uncle. The brother of her grandmother Louise, a simple farm wife in Carlton whom Sally revered. A kid whose Sally’s father, Harold, is named for.

He died nearly 107 years ago, July 3, 1918.

The personal gets lost in the body counts. Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychology professor, called it “psychic numbing.”

“Our sympathy for suffering and loss declines precipitously when we are presented with increasing numbers of victims,” he said.

It happens with mass shootings. It happens with refugees. And it happens with the so-called “war to end all wars,” which on this Memorial Day won’t resonate with most people in the least. Because, of course, it wasn’t the war to end all wars.

On this day, most will barbecue and relax and not think of the lives that have been given so that they can barbecue and relax. Others will grieve for fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters lost in World War II. Some for loved ones lost in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq or Afghanistan. And in military service beyond.