On this Memorial Day, let us never forget
Members of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment place flags at the headstones of U.S. military personnel buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in preparation for Memorial Day on Thursday in Arlington, Virginia. Credit: Getty Images/Andrew Harnik
Our nation was forged by war. And in the two-plus centuries since, we have gone to battle over and over for many different reasons, some noble, some less so.
We learn about these conflicts in real time from news media and then from a distance in textbooks, historical nonfiction, films, and TV shows. But unless we have the opportunity to absorb in person a firsthand account of the fighting, it can be easy to keep the reality of war at a distance.
In one sense, that can be healthy for the national psyche. But forgetting, or not knowing, or choosing not to remember, carries its own price. Because it is only in the act of recalling the horror of war, the awful reality of humanity in combat with itself, that we can remember the ghastly consequences.
We have shed a lot of blood in these pursuits. The enormity of the sacrifice our service members have made over the years of our national existence is difficult to wrap your mind around.
One can try to measure the loss with numerical tallies. The 620,000 killed in the Civil War. The more than 116,000 who died in World War I. The more than 400,000 service members who perished in World War II.
The 36,000-plus who gave their lives in the Korean War. The 58,000-plus killed in the Vietnam War. And the more than 7,000 who have died in the War on Terror that began in 2001.
The numbers of the dead, as impactful as they are, don’t account for the trauma of the living who loved them, or the trauma of those who fought and survived. The trauma of those who know there was something they did or didn’t do in combat that saved them and not someone else, or who know that perhaps their survival and the death of a comrade was simply a matter of luck. Those scars also are forever.
You can also gauge the weight of the absence of all those souls by acknowledging the presence of those who made it back home. You can see the spouses they found, the families they produced, the love they spawned, the dreams they nurtured, the jobs they did, the businesses they built, the communities they enriched, the things they achieved, all those accomplishments radiating outward over the rest of their lives and strengthening the rest of us.
And you wonder how much richer we all would have been had those we lost had the same chance. It is vitally important that we do engage in that wondering.
Memory is a muscle. It must be exercised. I worry that as we move further away from the great struggles of the last century and the casualties that accrued in pursuit of victory, as we lose the individuals who survived those wars and can testify in person to the monumental cost of these battles, we will stop thinking about them and gradually lose our sense of the significance of the Memorial Day we commemorate this weekend and the consequence of all those sacrifices.
A reader recently wrote to me about his experience serving in Vietnam, the questionable legitimacy of that mission and the cost of more than 58,000 lives. He wrote about two friends, also from Long Island, forever 24 and forever 23, as he put it, one buried at Arlington in Virginia, the other interred at Calverton.
His own life, he observed, has had many blessings, especially in the form of his multigenerational family. “My friends missed all of it,” he wrote. “I am proud of the fact that I served the Colors, but it has cost me.”
It has, in truth, cost us all.
On this Memorial Day, and all the ones to follow, we owe it to those who fought and died to remember their sacrifices and understand the everlasting tendrils of those losses.
Even the noblest of wars is hell. We owe it to those who died to never forget that.
Columnist Michael Dobie’s opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
