32nd Annual National Memorial Day Concert (PBS-TV, aired May 30, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after my husband Charles and I watched Rossini’s comic opera Le Comte Ory as part of a free trial offer from the Metropolitan Opera’s on-demand streaming service, he and I watched the repeat broadcast of the 32nd annual National Memorial Day Concert on PBS. A couple of caveats have to be stated in advance when discussing this “concert.” First, it has long since ceased to have any resemblance to what we usually think of as a “concert” – a program of one or more singers, accompanists or instrumentalists performing musical selections. Instead it’s become a quite elaborate program of war reminiscences saluting the various soldiers, sailors and others – including war nurses, who were the dominant honorees of the segment on Viet Nam – who have served in America’s wars, or at least the ones from World War II to the present since those are the ones where there are still surviving participants. Of the program’s 26 segments (at least according to the cue sheet I was keeping during it), only 11 featured either the National Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Jack Everly, who’s been at the helm of these events ever since their founding conductor, Erich Kunzel, died) or solo singers, even though the singers were pretty illustrious: Gladys Knight, Mickey Guyton, Denyce Graves, Sara Bareilles, The Four Tops (or at least a rump version thereof – Motown, now a division of Universal Music, owns all the old group names and can send out anyone they want even though Levi Stubbs, lead singer of the original Four Tops and more than anyone else responsible for their distinctive sound, died in 2008), Alan Jackson, Brian D’Arcy James, and Vince Gill.

Second, as the show has been given more and more to stories of American heroism and valor in combat, the overall impact of the show has become decidedly more grim. There used to be a sense of rah-rah patriotism about this event, but the way they do it now seems much more about the horrors of war than about anything glorious or noble about it. After Mickey Guyton (a currently popular Black singer who for some reason is characterized as country even though her music doesn’t sound especially “country” to me) to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Denyce Graves (introduced as a “superstar of opera,” which seemed a little excessive) did an O.K. song called “America, I Give My Best to You,” the narrators, Joe Mantegna and Gary Sinise (who have been hosting this show over and over for years), mentioned that 265,000 women had served in the armed forces during the Viet Nam conflict (though I suspect most of those were working in office jobs stateside since only 11,000 were actually “in country” and 7,500 of those were nurses), actress Kathy Baker did an extraordinary tribute to one of those nurses, Diane Carlson. As the National Symphony played Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (actually written in 1938, on the eve of World War II, but inextricably associated now with Viet Nam because of Oliver Stone’s use of it as the main soundtrack theme for his 1982 film Platoon). Baker read Carlson’s memoir of working as a nurse in Viet Nam under combat conditions, including having to make on-the-spot decisions as to who had a chance to survive and who did not and could therefore only be comforted and made to feel as much at ease as possible before they died of their wounds. She talked about having nightmares of her service that lasted well past the time she returned home – what was variously called “shell shock” or “the soldier’s heart” was a dirty secret of war undiscussed for centuries before it finally acquired a name and a medical diagnosis, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Baker’s performance – which ended, as many of the Memorial Day concert segments do, with the real person being paid tribute to being introduced and posing alongside the actor who had played him or her – was so powerful it made the musical selection that followed, Sara Bareilles singing Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” seem hopelessly banal by comparison. (I’m not knocking the song – like just about the rest of America, I fell in love with it when King put it out in 1972 as part of her Tapestry album – but it doesn’t have the emotional weight the producers of this concert needed at that moment. Then General Colin Powell, who’s also become a fixture of these events, introduced a tribute to Private Lawrence Brooks from World War II with a brief speech underscored by the orchestra playing Richard Rodgers’ “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the film Carousel (another piece of music that gets trotted out for occasions like this even though it, like “You’ve Got a Friend,” hardly has the emotional weight to carry the burden it’s assigned) and Gary Sinise paid tribute to Private Lawrence Brooks, who served at Pearl Harbor the day of the attack. The next segment was a tribute to the all-Black Second Rangers Unit that fought during the Korean War – while President Harry Truman had courageously ordered the U.S. military integrated in 1948, apparently a few all-Black units still persisted, and the record of the Second Rangers was a major step forward in that it proved that African-Americans were capable of serving not only as ordinary privates but in highly trained and skilled special units as well. Colin Powell said they were a particular inspiration to him as he was growing up, and their example helped him decide to make the military his career. The musical selection that followed this story was yet another overfamiliar anthem of bathos, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” though it was sung by Gladys Knight, whose vocal chops are still in great shape and who performed it with utter sincerity (this may be the best version I’ve ever heard of this song).

After that was a tribute to the veterans of the 1990 Gulf War which ended, bizarrely, with the rump Four Tops singing “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’” – the song seemed too blatantly sexual for the context and I thought “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” would have worked better. After that there was a tribute to the survivors of Pearl Harbor – two in particular, Maury Ganitch and Lee Canler (my apologies if my note-taking mangled their names) and then a tribute to the first responders to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The featured tributee was Steve Buscemi, who had been a New York firefighter before he became an actor and had just started filming a new movie when the 9/11 attacks happened and he volunteered to rejoin his old fire company and help with the rescue efforts. This time the song spotted after the 9/11 tribute was not an anticlimax: it was “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?,” written by country star Alan Jackson and first recorded and performed by him shortly after the attacks. It still packs an emotional wallop 20 years later – and its message of love, hurt and hope contrasts dramatically to the other country song that came out just after 9/11, Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” an open call to violence and revenge. (During Barack Obama’s terms as President he had stars like Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen at the White House or his events; the best Donald Trump could manage was Toby Keith.)

The next segment paid tribute to the Americans who have fought, and some who’ve died, in the so-called “generation of war” that has followed 9/11, including the war immediately launched against Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks because Osama bin Laden had supposedly launched them from there. I remember being on an anti-war protest march through downtown San Diego against George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq – a brutal dictatorship but also a secular Muslim country that had had nothing to do with 9/11 and did not possess either weapons of mass destructions or any functioning programs to build them – and someone came up to me and asked, “If we’re attacked, don’t we have a right to fight back?” “Who attacked us? Not Iraq!” I replied. “Where did the 9/11 hijackers come from? Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Where did we go to war? Afghanistan and Iraq.” The irrelevance of Afghanistan in the broader war against bin Laden and his al-Qaeda (“The Base”) organization became even clearer when, after nearly a decade of failure, the U.S. finally located him, hunted him down and killed him … not in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan, where the Pakistani military had been helping him hide out even while accepting U.S. aid as a supposed “partner” in the struggle against terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particuilar. Actresses Mary McCormick (whom I remember quite liking from the four seasons of her show In Plain Sight, in which she played an agent of the federal witness protection program trying to keep its clients alive) and Bailey Madison played the wife and daughter, respectively, of National Guard staff sergeant Joe Phaneuf, who had planned to leave the Guard and spend more time with his family – until 9/11 inspired him not only to re-enlist but to volunteer for combat, where he was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) and both his wife and his daughter had the grim experience of receiving the armed forces official who was there to tell them that Joe had died.

The song the concert organizers picked to follow that essentially unfollowable story was “You Will Be in My Heart” by Brian D’Arcy James, which made the predictable points but was more moving than “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Wind Beneath My Wings,” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone” had been earlier if only because it’s not so mind-numbingly familiar. Then Colin Powell asked the audience (not that there was one, this still being the COVID-19 era) to stand for the bugle call “Taps,” and after that came the show’s most intensely emotional moment, Vince Gill performing a song called “Go Rest High on That Mountain.” He’s done it before as a memorial – including a duet he and Patty Loveless performed on the Grand Ole Opry in 2003 as a tribute to the late George Jones – but Gill’s heartfelt sincerity and the simplicity of his arrangement (just his own guitar and a pianist accompanying him, appropriately, with gospel chords) made this, along with Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?,” the emotional high points of the program’s musical portions. (Vince Gill’s performance is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sht7VjoBC-8.) After that the hosts of the show gave out a national hotline for veterans suffering from PTSD, and then it was time for the traditional big finish – the medley of the theme songs of all the branches of the U.S. military. (Incidentally the so-called “Space Force” Donald Trump tried to establish – even though only Congress can actually create a U.S. military branch – doesn’t have a theme song yet, though at one point I tried to come up with one by writing suitably martial lyrics to John Williams’ theme from Star Wars. I got as far as, “Rise up! We are the Space Force! We are the Space Force, we conquer the stars. Rise up! We are the Space Force. We’re colonizing Venus and Mars.”)

Given how far away this show has gone from any actual celebration of the military spirit – the picture of war shown here was one of unrelieved horror, trauma and death, not a glorious enterprise but a dirty business that devalues all its participants and a sometimes necessary evil, but still an evil – the medley of the military themes seems weirdly out of place, a relic from a bygone era when people could still pretend that there was something noble and beautiful about human beings fighting each other and laying waste to each other’s countries on battlefields. General Mark A. Milley, current head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a brief tribute to the people who were killed at the Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks and then turned it over to Gladys Knight, who sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth (And Let It Begin with Me).” Various choristers from the military services joined in as her backup singers – which led Charles to joke, “All their lives, their one ambition was to be a Pip” – and then sang “God Bless America” with the National Symphony Orchestra to close the show. It’s been fascinating to watch the National Memorial Day Concert every year and note how it’s evolved over time; whatever its original intent was, today it’s become more of a memorial, not only to the individuals who die in wars but to our whole sense of shared purpose as communities, a country and, indeed, a human race. War is a wasteful enterprise but one that seems to reproduce itself in every generation – as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. noted in the preface to Slaughterhouse-Five in which he recalled being asked what he was working on. “An anti-war book,” he said – to which the person said, “Why bother to write an anti-war book? You might as well write an anti-glacier book?” It’s even more ironic given that human-caused climate change is melting the glaciers so severely that it’s likely glaciers will disappear well before war does!