(Last Memorial Day, American Legion Post 199 asked me to give a speech from a civilian's point of view, regarding Memorial Day. This article is Adapted from that talk)


It was 3am. I awoke to the screams from the bedroom below. I crept down, fearful that if I woke my grandmother, (ne: Florence Bonetti) she might have a heart attack. She was thrashing in agony. I had to wake her from the nightmare.

She was disoriented. There was a wild look in her eye.

Then she started to cry.

She gasped for air as she told me this was the night, the lady down her street in

Sacramento, had received the news that her boy had been killed in action.

“That poor, poor woman,” Beeb sobbed.

“She screamed every night and kept the whole neighborhood awake. I know the date. September 13th. It was the same day my Bobby died.”

Beeb had lost her own son, Bobby (Maggie’s brother) to Leukemia on the eve of his 12th Birthday back in 1930.

Beeb’s other son, Albert, was in the Army in Europe during the second War when her neighbor’s boy was killed.

What had those War years been like for that Swiss Italian grandmother who’d defied her father and run off and married a Scot? Her only remaining son was in harm’s way, daily.

My other Grandmother, Nina Palmquist Warren, had lost her brother, Jim to TB, then her first baby (named Jim) had died in child birth. Then her first husband, Cleve, died of TB, and now her eldest boy, Jim Pop, my dad, was with the 3rd Marine Division somewhere in the Pacific.

Having experienced so much death, how did Mama Warren sleep while her boy was off fighting on islands no one could pronounce?

In the 50’s, my friend Johnny and I used to play soldier in his grandmother’s house.

She had a room decorated like an officer’s cabin on ship. It had bunks, even a metal door with a porthole.

Her boy, Gene Witter (who’d famously blocked a punt to beat Stanford in the Big Game), had been on the USS San Francisco during the battle of Guadalcanal, when a Kamikaze Pilot flew his plane into the Bridge killing him instantly.

We were kids. We never knew how much pain was in that room.

Neither Gene, nor Uncle Al, nor Jim Pop had to go. They could have been exempted.

Albert, was Beeb’s sole support. He didn’t have to go.

Jim Pop was crippled by a high school football injury. His right arm wouldn’t straighten out. He had to lie to get in.

Finally, the paratroopers took him.

But they wouldn’t let him jump, so he ended up in the marines where they allowed as he was fit enough to wade through water on to sandy beaches into Japanese Machine gun fire.

Gene Witter volunteered, like Uncle Al and Jim Pop.

Just like young men and women volunteer today.

I am in awe of these children who put on a uniform and carry a gun that we here at home might breath free, and that men and women abroad might be freed from the iron boot of vicious dictators and religious fanatics.

Now that I’m a parent of service age children, my perspective is a little different.

Do I want to hear my wife screaming in the night, fearing for the safety of our only son or our two daughters?

People like me can’t say, “I know what you’re going through.” We don’t.

But we can be grateful.

We can be respectful.

We can offer our prayers.

We can be cognizant every day, that we have what we have, and live the lives we live, only because other parents are bearing the unbearable—suffering the insufferable—enduring the unendurable—all that the rest of us might get up each day, go down to the office, drive out to the fields, or enter the cellars.


Still, why do these kids do it? Why did Al, and Gene and Jim Pop?

It would be inappropriate for one who has never seen combat to talk about Duty, Honor and Country.

But the words of a famed old soldier (who never died, but only faded away), as he addressed a West Point Class, gives us some perspective.


“Duty, Honor, Country. The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral law and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the things that are right. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training--sacrifice. In battle, and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image. No physical courage and no greater strength can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However hard the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind."

We honor those men and women Monday.

But let us not forget the mothers, and grandmothers--many the daughters of immigrants-- who due to disease and poverty were no strangers to death--yet, somehow found the strength to give their country their sons--some of whom never came back.

If we in St. Helena sleep well tonight, it s because for generations, mothers and grandmothers, like Bib and Mama Warren, did not sleep well.

Those women raised the finest children the entire world has ever known.

We honor you. We honor all parents of soldiers. We are in your debt. And we shall never forget.



Friday, we lost a Giant. When the time is right, we’ll share some personal thoughts about Robert Mondavi—the man who built Napa Valley.









Jeffrey Earl Warren
James Warren & Son
1414 Main St.
St. Helena, Ca.
94574
707-963-2748