Sacrifices, Large and Small

Fall 2004

For a short while it almost felt like rain. The morning marine layer that had camped in the San Bernardino valley all week long was particularly thick on May 28, the start of the Memorial Day weekend and the day the university set for its first official observance of the holiday. Everyone hoped that by 9:50 the heavy gray soup would give way in time to make it safe for the planned flyover. The mist had no such schedule. On the day the country honored the American souls who had courageously fought and then relinquished their futures, “Discretion was the better part of valor,” observed a reporter attending the event once he heard that the flyover by four Korean War T-34s.

was scratched. Earlier, retired Navy officer Bob Tiberi, a CSUSB information technology consultant clad in Navy whites, said in a short address that Decoration Day, so called when it was established in 1868, was never meant to sing war's praises. “My own earliest remembrances,” he said, “are of accompanying my parents as they went to the cemetery to decorate the graves of family members with flowers and flags.” After the ceremony ended and most of the crowd had left, a woman from the audience walked up and asked him if he knew if Riverside National Cemetery would be holding a similar service. She hadn't visited her veteran husband's graveside since she'd buried him four months prior. Moved by Tiberi's speech, now she would. Memorial Day was as much a day for the living as it was for the dead, a reminder that the great sacrifice made by so many deserved at the very least a small sacrifice of gratefulness.

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