My wife and I took a much-needed weeklong vacation to Lanai, Hawaii, this past week. We left behind the grind of the workweek, mounting “to do” lists and, as it turns out, a malfunctioning refrigerator.

To fully embrace our Pacific retreat, once we landed in Hawaii we pledged to ignore our e-mail accounts. I also quarantined myself from any hint of social media, any mention of “breaking news,” and any television show with a pundit.

As a consequence of being sequestered on a remote Hawaiian island without a steady stream of substantive news, I was able to focus my attention on finding the answers to more pressing questions of my vacation:

• Do dolphins sleep? Yes, and approximately eight hours a day. It’s called “logging,” and it is similar to napping. Yet, fascinatingly, when dolphins sleep only half of their brain is inactive and only one eye is closed.
• Can one overdose on pineapple? Yes, especially on an island developed by the Dole family.
• How many pages did James Michener dedicate to chronicling the formation of the Hawaiian archipelago in his 1959 book Hawaii? Surprisingly, Michener spent only 16 pages on rock formations and lava; this is compared with the 921 pages he spent detailing the rest of the history of the islands.
• Should a guy ever pair a Speedo and a T-shirt, with nothing else, at the same time? Never, despite the Speedo renaissance as reported by CultureMap's Steven Thomson.

Reality Check
The one disadvantage I discovered in going somewhat “off the grid” is that getting up to speed on the events of the world after a week off can be jarring.

As I sat in the Honolulu Airport, acclimatizing to humanity and to the news of the day, I found particularly depressing the Associated Press story that explained how a “grim milestone was reached when NATO reported that a service member was killed in a roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan."

The AP later reported that the 1,000th American casualty of the war in Afghanistan was Marine Cpl. Jacob Leicht of Kerrville. According to his brother, this 24-year-old, born on the Fourth of July, told people he “always wanted to die for his country and be remembered."

With Memorial Day last Monday, and with the 66th anniversary of the D-Day invasion this Sunday, there’s no better time than now for us all to take some time off and reflect on those, like Jacob Leicht, who have sacrificed for this country.

Memorial Day Origins
Congress mandated the last Monday in May as an official holiday in 1971, yet Memorial Day originated in the wake of the American Civil War. It was meant to commemorate fallen service members of that conflict.
In 1868 the veteran group the Grand Army of the Republic described the purpose of the day as one for “strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land."

I wanted to relay that historical tidbit about Memorial Day to the driver of a pickup truck who idled in front of me at a stoplight near downtown Houston this weekend.

On his bumper was a sticker with a Texas flag and the words “SECEDE” emblazoned over it.

You see, when I see the word “secede,” I don’t think of state pride or principled stances about state sovereignty. Rather, I think of Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor; and I think of the thousands of Americans, from the North and South, who died there.

Had the light not turned green, I would have also recommended to the driver of said secessionist pickup truck that he pick up Drew Gilpin Faust’s 2008 book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. In the book, Faust employs staggering statistics to quantify the extent of the war’s carnage, and she chronicles how Americans coped and dealt with death during the conflict.

Faust estimates, as other historians have done as well, that the number of American casualties during Civil War was 620,000. This figure was “approximately equal to the total fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined."

Faust explains that “the Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population was six times that of World War II.” And Faust notes, “One in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War." Shockingly, Faust calculates that approximately two percent of the American population died in the American Civil War.

To put it in another way, Faust estimates this “would mean six million fatalities” today.

I doubt Rick Perry will utter any secessionist talk in the general election campaign against Bill White. But if he does, I’m going to mail Governor Perry my personal copy of This Republic of Suffering to read.

Doris Miller
Despite my inattention to the news in Hawaii this past week, I found it next to impossible not to think about World War II while staring out onto the Pacific Ocean. Scenes from the haunting HBO series The Pacific were still seared in my imagination, and our close proximity to Pearl Harbor brought to mind that day that still lives in “infamy.”

Yet just a stone’s throw from my house here in Houston is another memorial to a hero who fought and died in World War II. The Doris Miller Center, a library and former elementary school in HISD, sits amid a canyon of townhomes on Feagan Street in the Rice Military neighborhood.

The center is named after Doris “Dorie” Miller, originally from Waco, who became the first African-American awarded the Navy Cross “for his extraordinary courage in battle.” During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Miller rescued fellow sailors and fired an anti-aircraft gun at attacking Japanese planes. What made Miller’s conduct even more extraordinary was “it was Miller's first experience firing such a weapon.” As an African-American sailor, Miller served “in the segregated steward's branch of the navy” and as a result was “not given the gunnery training received by white sailors.”

Tragically, Miller was killed in action in 1943 when the aircraft carrier Liscome Bay he was serving on was torpedoed and sunk in the Pacific Ocean. In memoriam, the Navy “honored Doris Miller by naming a dining hall, a barracks, and a destroyer escort for him.” You may have seen Cuba Gooding Jr. playing Miller in Hollywood’s 2001 Pearl Harbor. While the movie overall was forgettable, the actions of those at Pearl Harbor, like Dorie Miller, are not.

The Associated Press story documented how for one soldier, "Capt. Nick Ziemba of Wilbraham, Massachusetts, serving with the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment in southern Afghanistan," the number "1,000 was an arbitrary number and would have no impact on troop morale or operations." "We're going to continue to work," Ziemba declared.

And this time of year, the least we can all do is respect and remember their service and sacrifice.