Happy Memorial Day. I always had trouble saying that. Those two words don’t go together in my mind. It should be “Somber Memorial Day,” or “Reflective Memorial Day,” or even “Peaceful Memorial Day,” but not “Happy Memorial Day.” This is the day we honor those who died in war — and we’re supposed to remind each other to be happy about it? I have never wished anyone a happy Memorial Day.
But something shifted for me this year.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Buddy.
My mother, Marysue, was one of twelve children. When she was a teenager, they adopted a thirteenth because the baby needed a home. All six of her brothers served in war. My mom’s twin sister has a daughter who is a full colonel, with brigadier general as the next rank. Between my uncles and my cousins, my family has served in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War. In fact, every generation of my family has served this country, back to my sixth-great-grandfather, who at sixteen was a drummer boy in the Revolutionary War.
Each of them has a story full of private fears and longings. Was there anyone there to see them off when they boarded the planes, ships, horses, or wagons that would take them to battle? Was there a sweetheart or a worried mother counting the days until their return?
It was eighty-two years ago this month that Buddy went to war. His sweetheart was an artist. Did she draw pictures so she would remember him?
Buddy was the eldest of Marysue’s twelve siblings. She and her twin sister, Martha Lou, shared their birthday with him, which made them feel special. They looked up to their smart big brother, who skipped two grades, never opened a book, and still got all A’s.
After high school, Buddy went to the University of Oklahoma on a full scholarship to study business. But one spring day in 1943, instead of going to class, he walked into the recruiting office on campus and said he wanted to apply to fighter pilot school. They told him he was too tall. He asked about bomber school. They told him he was too skinny. So Buddy went home and ate bananas. Marysue still laughs when she remembers it: “His cheeks were so stuffed full of bananas, just like a monkey.” Two weeks later, he went back, made the weight, and they signed him up for bomber school.
Becoming a pilot during World War II meant an arduous, year-long training program at four different schools. It began with learning how to don a parachute and escape a crippled plane. Then came countless takeoffs and landings, followed by instruction in aerobatic maneuvers, map reading, and cross-country flying. Finally, the aspiring pilot could solo and perform lazy eights, loops, snap rolls, and spins. The attrition rate was almost 40 percent, and a cadet could wash out at any point because of physical problems, accidents, or an inability to master the academics.
Buddy wrote home, “At each formation, you could tell that the class was dwindling. But I can see now that I will make it and if nothing goes wrong with my plans, I will be a man with wings in another nine weeks.”
Buddy flourished in flight school and bonded with his instructor, “a cute, little roly-poly Frenchman.” It seemed that every time he turned around, someone was telling him he was the cream of the country.
Marysue was ten years old when the family went to Texas to watch Buddy get the shiny wings pinned to his fancy new uniform. “I remember that graduation ceremony — mud everywhere — but Buddy stood tall and straight in the middle of it all. We were all so proud.”
Buddy — or newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Luther Hendrix Smith Jr. — was the family’s way out.
From the time he was little, Buddy was a golden child — brilliant, funny, and a natural leader. He embodied hope for his poor Oklahoma family, who had struggled through the Depression with too many children and never enough money. Shirley, the eldest sister, later confided in me just how hard life had been.
“You heard of rag people? That’s who we were. There was no time to be kids and play. We had to be home fifteen minutes after school. All us kids scoured the neighborhoods for rags and newspapers that we could bundle up and sell. We had no permanent home. Mother would rent a house, and we would live there until the owners ran us off. Then we’d go to another house on a different side of town until the same thing happened.”
By the time Buddy graduated from flight school, the Depression was over. The family finally had a permanent home — a ramshackle Victorian with a yard to play in. It seemed as though the hardest times were behind them.
When asked for a memory of Buddy, Ruth Anne, the youngest sister, said, “I was three, and Buddy was playing hide-and-seek with me. We had a big couch up against the picture window. He was on the porch. I was inside. I’d hide, then pop up. He’d make funny faces at me through the window, just like a big brother would.”
The day he left, my grandmother lit a candle and placed it in the picture window. She said it would burn every day until Buddy came home.
On May 6, 1944, when Buddy left for war, D-Day was a closely held secret, exactly one month away. A second lieutenant, newly graduated from bomber pilot training, would have known nothing of Operation Overlord or the two million Allied personnel marshalling for the invasion that would change the course of the war. All Buddy knew was that he was a man with wings, the cream of the country, on his way to Podington, an ancient village with a medieval castle, home to one of 200 U.S. airfields across East Anglia, England. Even in peacetime, Podington is off the beaten track. In war time, with road signs gone and a blackout, it must have been like the other side of the moon.
Podington was home to the 92nd Bomb Group, Heavy. They flew Flying Fortresses with a wingspan of 103 feet, a gross weight of 65,000 pounds, and a range of 3,750 miles — far enough to fly deep into Germany and drop 1,000-pound bombs in an effort to cripple the Nazi war machine before D-Day.
Somewhere inside that vast machinery of war, Buddy was still just twenty years old, about to fly his first mission. Before dawn on May 20, 1944, someone came to wake him the way they woke bomber crews in England — gently, almost tenderly, as if the war allowed, in that one small moment, a kind of mercy. Maybe there was a low voice in the dark, a hand on the shoulder, the ember of a cigarette glowing briefly, before the day began in earnest. Whatever passed in those last quiet minutes belonged to that private world between sleep and duty, before the engines started and fear had to be swallowed down.
Outside, the fog at Podington was so thick it seemed to erase the world. Men had to walk beside the bombers just to guide them to the runway. At 7:11 a.m., the lead bombers took off. First one, then another, and another — every thirty seconds, released by stopwatch into a whiteness no one could see through. The seventh plane, just two aircraft ahead of Buddy, lost control in the fog, careened off the runway, struck a wall, and crashed. The control tower ordered the others to immediately stop takeoffs. Flares shot out. Warnings blasted over the radio. The next plane in line heard the warnings, turned around and started back up the runway. But Buddy’s plane, with Lt. James Wiggins at the controls and Buddy beside him, could not hear the order to abort over the roar of the engines, nor see the flares through the blinding fog. Lt. Wiggins barreled down the runway, all systems go, until there was no time left to change what was coming.
The planes struck head-on.
Then came the fire and the explosions that tore open the morning as all the 1,000-pound bombs in three fully loaded, crashed Fortresses – detonated, blasting out windows and violently shaking the entire airfield all the way to the quaint, sleeping village of Podington, standing since the 11th century, hundreds of wars ago.
In all, twenty-one airmen, just a few years out of boyhood, were killed, and nine suffered serious burns and injuries.
Buddy had crossed an ocean to fly his first mission and never even got off the ground.
Afterward, the Army Air Forces changed the rules. No more bombers would be sent down a runway every thirty seconds in zero visibility. It is hard not to think that boys like Buddy, even in death, were still teaching the living what the cost of war really was.
Even so, the war did not pause. The runway was gouged and broken, with craters as deep as eighteen feet in places. A battalion of soldiers, engineers and heavy equipment descended on the wreckage and decimated runway, working with astonishing speed until the airfield reopened in less than 24 hours. D-Day was coming fast and every bomber had a crucial mission — destroy Germany’s capabilities before Normandy’s beaches could be stormed.
While history pressed forward toward D-Day, Buddy’s family in Oklahoma remained suspended in another kind of time altogether — the slow, ordinary time of waiting, hoping, and half-knowing.
Soon enough, uniformed men would walk up the path to the old Victorian house with the big yard and too many children. There would be a knock at the door. Three-year-old Ruth Anne would answer because the handsome men reminded her of Buddy.
And their world would implode.
Eventually, Buddy’s mother, my grandmother, would reach for the little candle in the window and blow it out. But before that moment came, there was a strange and private forewarning.
Martha later remembered, “Before Buddy died, I was dusting the mantel when I decided to see whether there was anything on the back of Buddy’s picture. I don’t know why I did it; I just did. I removed the backing and found a written note: ‘If you are reading this, I am probably dead. I love you all.’ I quickly put it back and never told anyone until after Buddy was killed. I looked behind the picture again, but the note was gone.”
Maybe that is what Memorial Day asks of us — not happiness, exactly, but remembrance honest enough to hold sorrow and gratitude in the same breath. To remember the war dead not only as names or folded flags, but as whole people: beloved sons, goofy big brothers, gifted students, young men with bright futures, and little girls peering through a window while someone they loved made a funny face just to make them laugh.
So no, I still don’t think I can say, “Happy Memorial Day.”
But I can say this: today I remember Buddy and the happiness he brought to his family in the short time he was here. For eighty-two years, the story of that morning at Podington remained locked in the quiet, heavy vault of our family’s history — a sudden, violent end to a boy who had only ever wanted to fly. When the airfield reopened less than 24 hours later, the war moved on, but for my family, time in some ways stood still. We kept his letters, we kept the photographs of him in his pressed uniforms and all those with his siblings, but we also kept the ache of what might have been.
Looking at his face this year, something shifted for me. I realized that keeping Buddy’s memory shrouded only in the tragedy of his final moments does a disservice to the vibrant, brilliant boy who skipped grades and ate dozens of bananas just to prove he belonged in the sky. His life was short, but it was profoundly full of promise, love, and a rare, untamed spirit.
So when Monday comes and the world casually exchanges greetings, I still won’t say those three words. But I will think of Buddy, not as a name etched on a monument, but as a boy with wings. And in that remembrance, there is a quiet, enduring kind of joy.
