EDITORIAL: Remember the lives behind the sacrifice
Who are the war dead, and why do we remember them?
They are the men and women who stepped forward when their nation called.
They hailed from New Jersey and Tennessee and the great wide west. They hailed from cities, suburbs and farms, from our greatest mountains and our deepest valleys.
They are soldiers and Marines and sailors and air corps members, individuals who loved and were loved, had hobbies and odd jobs, and who, ultimately, died in faraway places — from Anzio to Normandy to Okinawa, from Khe Sanh to Belleau Wood, from Fallujah to the Helmand province — and even on our own soil.
Their names are etched into a black wall in Washington that honors the fallen from the Vietnam War, and into old stones in the middle of town squares that honor the dead from The Great War — World War I — as well as World War II and Korea.
Some war dead are remembered on markers in foreign fields, while others have been lost to history, and lain to rest in unmarked graves.
In Boston, an impressive bronze relief sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens pays tribute to Robert Gould Shaw and members of the 54th Massachusetts, an all-black regiment with white officers who died serving in our bloody civil war, and were later immortalized in the Robert Lowell poem, “For the Union Dead.” And of course, in Arlington National Cemetery, row upon row of simple white headstones remind us of the price of liberty.
In modern times, and the age of terror and less conventional warfare, we can in a sense also count those who died in the attacks of 9/11 and in similar attacks since as among our war dead. We must not forget to honor those who died in our most recent wars, Afghanistan and Iraq.
As is the norm in a free society, sometimes in America we get caught up in strategy and purpose and arm-chair philosophy after the fact, in whether a war or military action was necessary or “just,” or in how much money was spent to conduct it. Such questions are the currency of historians, politicians and social commentators, and these days they can make the rounds quickly on the internet.
Yet such discussions on the worthiness of a certain war or battle offer little solace to our Gold Star families whose husbands and wives and sons and daughters were sent to the frontlines and made the ultimate sacrifice, the individuals who gave what Lincoln described in his Gettysburg Address as “the last full measure of devotion.”
So today on this Memorial Day, the day we have sat aside to honor our war dead, let us once more remember them, call their names and mark their sacrifice each in our own way. Across the ages, they are joined in death because they all wore a version of the same uniform, but let us not forget that they were individuals too.
Today, let us say their names.