"Memorial Day" is not a "happy" holiday.

The gravesite placard honoring my father's military service in World War II.

At 9 o'clock this morning, President Donald J. Trump sent out a three-word tweet -- one of many of varying length that has burst forth onto the world from his smartphone over this holiday weekend. This particular one was in all capital letters, which in Internet parlance is the equivalent of shouting. It simply read:

"HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!"

As usual, our accidentally-elected chief executive was totally tone deaf.

Yes, Memorial Day is often seen as the beginning of summer, and there are often celebrations large and small over the long weekend. But its roots are more in remembrance than hedonism, and perhaps it's more appropriate to think of it in the former context than the latter -- especially at the end of an 11-week period in which nearly 98,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus with the promise of many more to come.

Memorial Day has its roots in the years following the Civil War, when Americans sought to solemnize the grievous losses the war-torn nation suffered during the four-year conflict. In 1868, it was established as "Decoration Day," to be marked by the decoration of military graves each May 30 because that date did not coincide with any of the major battles during the war. Most states observed it on their own, although some Southern states established a "Confederate Memorial Day" on their own (and still celebrate that treasonous secession today).

Over the years, "Decoration Day" gave way to Memorial Day as the nation added conflict upon conflict to its somber ledger. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act and established Memorial Day as an official Federal holiday, to take place on the last Monday of May. It went into effect in 1971.

CPO Anthony C. Farinella, USN

On this day, I particularly remember my father, Tony Farinella, who served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He graduated from Mansfield High School in 1937 and had gone to work for his older brother, Santino, who had founded a new downtown clothing store on North Main Street. Four years later, not long after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, my father enlisted in the Navy and set out to sea.

Drawing upon his experience in retail sales, my father assumed the role of storekeeper's mate and advanced to the rank of Chief Petty Officer in charge of supply and distribution of goods to his shipmates. He served aboard a ship called an LST (or "tank landing ship"), which supported amphibious operations with its unique ability to ground itself and open its bow to unload tanks and other large pieces of equipment.

An LST had a crew of about 150 officers and enlisted men. They were a relatively new concept, designed to beach, unload and retreat quickly and effectively, and were sturdy ships; very few of the more than 1,000 built after 1943 were lost to direct enemy action. And while they were slow, they could defend themselves against aerial attack with a variety of anti-aircraft weaponry.

My father participated in both theaters of operation aboard ships of this sort. His LST participated in the Allied landing at Anzio in Italy in January 1944, but as he told me, his personal participation was limited to being "in the rear with the gear." He eventually returned to the States and was stationed at the Jacksonville (Fla.) Navy Yard, where he met my mother, a young Navy Yard civilian secretary. They married and he shipped out again for the Pacific in the waning days of the war.

A U.S. Navy LST unloads on a beach during World War II.

Tony didn't tell me too many war stories because, as he said, he didn't have many. For the most part, his participation was clerical, filling out requisition forms and making sure the sailors had fresh socks when they needed them. But on an LST, with its small contingent of crew, everyone had a job to do when the general quarters alarm was sounded.

It took years for me to coax my father into telling me the one "war story" he cared to share. His station at general quarters was at one of the two-man anti-aircraft gun turrets near the bridge, which was rarely visited during his time in Europe. But the Pacific war was as much an aerial war as it was a naval one, and Japanese aircraft continued to attack American convoys right up to the last days of the war.

It was during one of these fleeting attacks, my father said, that he watched in horror as the gunner in his turret was shot and killed. The procedure was strictly "next man up" as long as the gun was still operational, and so my father stepped behind the shoulder padding, cocked the gun, aimed it at the sky -- and promptly pissed his pants out of abject terror.

He told me that story late in 1971, on a trip home from college. He had hesitated to tell me the tale because he feared I would think that his human reaction to a moment of compete fear was unheroic. I assured him I would have done the same had I faced a similar situation.

The conversation came during the waning days of the Vietnam War, when young men my age were facing the prospect of losing their college deferments and being drafted, and the story was told as part of a larger discussion of what my intentions would be should the draft board come calling.

No, I did not want to serve in Vietnam. My father didn't want me there, either. He wasn't very political, but he lost faith in the validity of the conflict over its many years and feared the worst should his only child be called to fight for an unworthy cause. But he left it up to me. He said he would support my decision no matter what, and would not shun me if I decided to move to Canada to avoid the draft. I told him that I loved my country and did not want to desert it in that manner, but that I appreciated his support more than he could know.

As it turned out, we were both spared from having to make that decision simply because of my birthdate. I was in the Class of 1975 at Northwestern, and as it turned out, that was the last graduating class from which young men were drafted for service. But I had been bumped ahead a year when I enrolled in Dominican Academy in Plainville back in 1959, thus I was a calendar year younger than most of my classmates at NU, and not yet eligible for the draft. A birthdate lottery was still held in 1974 for those born in 1954, but nobody was drafted -- and I did not know until just as I was writing this blog post what my draft-order number was.

It was 230, by the way. Most likely, I would not have been drafted.

So, no, I did not serve in the US military -- which, I suppose, makes me a "commie pinko libtard snowflake," at least in the eyes of those that have co-opted military service to represent the be-all and end-all of determining an individual's worthiness as an American. I guess they give a pass to Trump, a/k/a Corporal Bone Spurs, whose rich daddy found a fraudulent means of keeping his silver-spoon-fed boy out of the Army.

But my father did serve, and he never thought his son was deficient for not serving, because he understood the difference between defending the world against Nazi tyranny and the questionable moral foundation of Vietnam. That's good enough for me.

By the way, as of today, there have been almost 40,000 more deaths among Americans from the COVID-19 virus in just this year alone than there were combat-related U.S. casualties in the entirety of the Vietnam War.

Remember them as well.