By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
May 31, 2011
Memorial 
Day is different from other holidays. Unlike Thanksgiving, Fourth of July or religious festivals where the celebrations recall rather abstract events, Memorial Day for me is about a particular person known and loved by his family and friends. Memorial Day is both a remembrance of millions of lives cut short by war and a remembrance of my granduncle, John Ammon (photo right), who was killed in the mud of France just before World War I ended in 1918. He was thirty years old--an orphan, a patriot, a noble friend and loving brother, a doting uncle, a caring companion and a fearless soldier. He deserves more homage than I can give here.
As a small gesture of honor, I went to his grave today in a quiet corner of Arlington National Cemetery (photo below right). The modest white granite marker is almost never visited and is nearly forgotten by his descendants after 93 years. (Click on photos to enlarge.)
How much more can a person give to a cause, to his country, to his unit, to his family than to bravely sacrifice his life? To endure the horrors of war's hell and not survive, to die in the blast of an artillery shell, instantly.
I remember him this day, and beyond, with a sad and grateful heart. Several years ago my cousin Albert and I wrote a tribute to uncle John, about his life and his death recalling as much a we could from his letters from the front and from family stories. In the process he became more real, a person of kindness, fairness and integrity.
As a son of a Swiss immigrant he was aware of a greater American purpose than himself and joined the army to commit to that higher cause. (photo left, printed memorial from the government of France in recognition of John’s sacrifice “pour la liberte pendant la Grande Guerre: Hommage de la France”; signed, Poincaire, President de la Republique.)
Shipped overseas in the spring of 1918 with his Company I, he was part of the final October assault against the Germans in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the Champaigne region of northeast France. In the course of a month thousands of soldiers on both sides died in a torrent of steel and blood. (Read the book 'All Quiet on the Western Front' by Remarque to understand the horrors and agony of this battle.)
Uncle John almost made it through this holocaust, to October 16, when an artillery shell struck him and his buddies as they were maneuvering in the tiny village of St. George, within view of the local cemetery. He was buried with his friends not far away and later taken to Arlington Cemetery. His grave stone silently bears witness to this fine man on this Memorial Day 2011.
Read his story: Remembering John Ammon
By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
MemorialDay, May 31, 2010
Ninety-two years ago my great uncle, John Ammon (photo right), had his young life taken from him in a 1918 World War I battle (St. Georges, France), less than 30 days before the armistice that ended the carnage. The total number of Americans killed and wounded numbered about 330,000. (The total number of deaths and injuries for all countries involved in that war is close to 30 million.)
In a short biography about Uncle John we wrote:
"How are people remembered after they die? Unless blessed or cursed with fame or infamy, the departed are usually recalled in family photos, memories and in the recollections of friends for a while until the last 'I knew him’ is buried.
"Silence and forgetting move in like the afternoon fog. Who of us recalls our grandparents or great grandparents even if they lived into their late eighties? And what about the many countless folks who died without offspring or without any important artifact of their fourscore years of walking the earth?
"And what about those who die young and virtually unnamed in the nightmare of warfare?
"The brother of my grandfather Francis, Uncle John Ammon (born June 11, 1888; photo above) was neither a rebel nor a rich man, and was not well known. He was killed in France as the was ending. He was 30, not married and not a father. Yet he didn’t die wholly anonymous. Instead of children or fortune he left a modest paper trail of his life in the form of photographs he took before the war as well as postcards and letters he wrote to his brother Francis during his army time up to within a month of his death…"
John wanted to join the forces and serve his country. It seemed to him and thousands of others the right thing to do. He was upbeat and reliable, a man of honesty and compassion. But such things don't count on the battlefield where human beings are reduced to stick figures with a weapon, a mere silhouette to be eliminated.
(photo: American 23rd Infantry Regiment in action at Belleau Wood, France, June 3, 1918)
But back home that same stick silhouette is a fully-fleshed person with deep meaning and attachment to family and friends. Add to that bond the mysterious inner force that urges that young person, motivated by a protective duty, to join a dangerous cause in which death is a real possibility. Overzealous as many young men and women were to 'fight the krauts', in his private moments I feel John clearly knew he was on a risky path far away from home and facing hard living in tents and ditches. But he went forward and obeyed orders because it was right for his country and his family.
His sacrifice rings in my mind to this day. He went to war for a bit of adventure, perhaps, but more out of a sense of protecting his family from harm. He grew up in an orphanage and knew well the loss of protection, being in a world with no security other than his own making. There was a higher cause to his sense of life, a cause that spoke to him out of his own damaged childhood that life must be guarded and deliberately forged by effort and determination; a good life was not something you were 'entitled' to, that got handed to you at no expense. You worked and made a life, for yourself and your loved ones. And if that work called for sacrifice then you made it and held on as long as you could.
And that's what he did until his end. His gift to me, three generations later, is the freedom I have today to choose my life and express who I am as a citizen, friend, lover, brother, son. All the things he gave up.
I remember him with bowed humility and deep gratitude on Memorial Day 2010.
Day is different from other holidays. Unlike Thanksgiving, Fourth of July or religious festivals where the celebrations recall rather abstract events, Memorial Day for me is about a particular person known and loved by his family and friends. Memorial Day is both a remembrance of millions of lives cut short by war and a remembrance of my granduncle, John Ammon (photo right), who was killed in the mud of France just before World War I ended in 1918. He was thirty years old--an orphan, a patriot, a noble friend and loving brother, a doting uncle, a caring companion and a fearless soldier. He deserves more homage than I can give here.
How much more can a person give to a cause, to his country, to his unit, to his family than to bravely sacrifice his life? To endure the horrors of war's hell and not survive, to die in the blast of an artillery shell, instantly.
Uncle John almost made it through this holocaust, to October 16, when an artillery shell struck him and his buddies as they were maneuvering in the tiny village of St. George, within view of the local cemetery. He was buried with his friends not far away and later taken to Arlington Cemetery. His grave stone silently bears witness to this fine man on this Memorial Day 2011.
