Memorial Day about more than raising flags

A train full of war-bound airmen made a stop for water and coal in Ames, Iowa. That would have been in 1942, when Constantine "Cookie" Cucurullo was a newly minted airman of 21.

That train lives on in Cucurullo's memory and that memory steps out front and center every Memorial Day.

What do soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines think about on Memorial Day? They think about other soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines. While the rest of us raise flags, veterans like Cookie raise the memory of comrades, fallen and too-oft forgotten for the flesh-and-blood sons and fathers they once were.

For Cookie Cucurullo, it's Cal Flagstad, a pilot and native of Ames, who begged for permission to leave the train and say hello to his family. Cookie, who was born in Brooklyn, went along with him.

"His mother asked if I was a gunner and I said yes," Cookie said. "She gave me a big hug and a kiss and said, 'Take care of Cal.' "

Cookie did, for the 30 missions he and Cal flew together in the Air Force. But there came a day when they were assigned to separate planes, with the job of bombing islands in the Pacific to clear the way for Marine units.

Cookie came back.

Cal didn't.

And so Cookie, who volunteers at the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, thinks of Cal. And of Cal's mother, whom he never saw again, as the music plays during Memorial Day ceremonies at the museum.

He also thinks about a navigator named Blessing, whose plane Cookie saw go down over Borneo. He thinks about other veterans, men who served in Europe, the Pacific and Vietnam, friends to whom he grew close after he'd returned from war to marry Kathryn, his boss's new secretary, and moved to Wantagh, where the couple would raise two sons and two daughters.

At the museum, Cookie walks past a display case of stainless steel ID bracelets. "I've got one of those," he says. "They'd be able to identify you if you crashed and burned because the IDs don't melt."

He shows a visitor a gunner's station -- Cookie manned top gunners' turrets in B-25 airplanes and ball (bottom) turrets in B-24s and B-17s -- and then points to the hearing aids in both ears. He doesn't have to explain a thing because the gunner's station shows it all: Cookie flew 50 missions in a tight gunner's bubble with inches between his ears and rapid-firing guns.

Cookie still carries his draft card; his staff sergeant uniform is still in his closet (moths got to the collar, he says, but the local cleaners saved the day by turning the collar around); and he still has the diary in which he recorded the details of every mission so carefully that his superior crossed out some of it -- like where, and how many planes did not come back -- before Cookie could bring the diary home.

Cookie spends many of his days at the museum ("I stopped after driving past one day years ago," he said. "I smelled the gasoline and oil and it was like I was home again."); he's also a frequent visitor to Calverton National Cemetery, where Kathryn is buried. She died years ago of Alzheimer's disease.

"It's peaceful there," Cookie says of the place where someday he will rest with his beloved bride and with veterans who have served their country well and whom he remembers this Memorial Day. Cookie, one in a rapidly dwindling number of World War II veterans, asks that we remember too.

"They don't really teach World War II in schools anymore," he says. "People don't but need to understand that it was a war of survival." Had the Japanese added ground to the air forces in Pearl Harbor, they could have invaded the country, Cookie says. Had the Royal Air Force had less resolve in keeping Hitler from Britain, Europe could have been lost, too, he adds.

Cookie's knowledge, his memories make Memorial Day into something more than a picnic, sale or celebration. And that is as it should be.

Take time to join Cookie today. And remember.