We Remember
A military obligation that all of us share.
Fifty years ago it was 1968. The war in Vietnam was in full swing. So were the anti-war protests. Sometimes we say that Vietnam was the first war won by civilians. Other times we say that the frustration of the powerful by that hard-to-dispute fact laid down the foundations of the political and economic policies that gave us today’s crippling income inequality.
But today is Memorial Day, so let’s remember our soldiers, the ones who died and the ones who live with the memories of horror, with equal honor.
Wars
In the US Civil War, at least 620,000 died in the line of duty. That’s about 2% of the population at the time. More died from disease that swept through the hospital camps, the prisons, and the regiments than died cleanly from deadly shots. The war lasted 4 years, more or less. How do you mark the end of a cultural rift like that? Some of us are still fighting. But if we pretend it lasted 4 years, we paid 418 lives/day on average.
World War I claimed about 54,000 American lives. The US involvement lasted 1 year, 7 months, and 5 days. In the three years, 8 months, and 22 days of US involvement in World War II, we lost 418,200 American lives. So WWI cost about 20 lives per day, and WII cost about 308 lives per day of US involvement. We got off easily at that, compared to the devastation suffered by other nations. And at least, for those sacrifices, there was a clear resolution to the conflict. And, in the case of WW II, we could tell which team to root for.
Modern Wars
Wars are different now. In Vietnam we reported enemy body counts on the national news every evening, but that war effectively ended involuntary conscription, though the Selective Service law is still on the books.
In Afghanistan it’s big news when an American gets killed. In the 17 years we’ve had troops there, the military casualty total is still under 2,300. One death every three days, in theater.
But that toll doesn’t count the volunteers, and they all are volunteers, who are discharged alive from this forever-war but find they are unable to resume normal civilian lives without physical or emotional pain. And it doesn’t count the suicides. The price of ending conscription is that we send our volunteer soldiers out for one tour of duty after another, until we have used them up.
The Home Front
Once upon a time we had leaders who took the sacrifice of our citizen soldiers seriously. Our wars were declared, and our soldiers knew what they were fighting for. Our civilians were proud of them. Even so, we always had men who lost themselves in the horror. We called it Shell Shock. Battle Fatigue. Now it’s PTSD, and it’s the rule, not the exception. We need to acknowledge and honor the sacrifice of these walking wounded on this day as well.
In 2001–2003, the Middle East wars became a tool of ideologues. We had a lot of talk about “just wars” but even at the time we suspected these wars weren’t just at all. And today talk of war is so loose we don’t know what to think. Do our leaders understand the consequences of their saber-rattling at all? How will our soldiers keep their hearts and minds intact if forced to fight a war begun at random by the sound and fury of a malevolent narcissist?
So even though our wars seem to have become less deadly, at least until one of them kills us all, they are still an evil that we have to fight. We must fight the injustice, and we must fight the harm they do to our brave soldiers. And by definition, while soldiers must fight wars, it is civilians who must fight to end them, and to stop them from beginning.
Here at home, those of us who resist tyranny and madness in our own government are also suffering a kind of battle fatigue. We are traumatized by events like Charlottesville and Parkland. Shocked by humanitarian abuses that just keep happening. Now we are separating children from their parents because they dared to approach our Mexican border from the south. What will be next? How can we go on?
Reflection
So today, in the quiet of the evening, after the games and the barbecues and the visits to the graves, let us reflect on how we best honor our dead and their sacred memory. Let us lay down our fatigue and refresh our courage in the remembrance of theirs. The obligation rests upon us, the living, soldiers and civilians both, to preserve the legacy of freedom, decency, and compassion that the fallen died to protect.
We still have work to do. We do it because we remember.
