The parades, flags and mass prayers are meant to honor men and women who died nobly for their country, but they also commemorate the barbaric enterprise of those who sent them to kill and be killed for reasons that are not fully understood and shared by fellow Americans.
Since World War II, our young people have been giving up their lives in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and smaller wars elsewhere with no clear consensus about the goals. On this of all days, shouldn’t we question why they have to do so?
As a member of the so-called Greatest Generation, I left and came back to a country united in an agreed-on reality–to defeat a Nazi war machine bent on world domination. Since then, younger generations have given their lives for abstractions such as the Domino Theory of Communism and the War on Terror, the former turning out to be a fallacy, the latter clearly heading that way.
This gap between the bravery of those who wear the uniform and the muddled motives of those who send them into danger makes a sad mockery of Memorial Day.
On 60 Minutes, Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, the first living Medal of Honor awardee in this century, describes himself as an “average, mediocre” soldier and says, “I’m not at peace with that at all. And coming and talking about it and people wanting to shake my hand because of it, it hurts me because it’s not what I want.”
What Giunta feels will be understood by anyone who has been a soldier and knows that the essence of war is doing what has to be done and that circumstances, not individual choice, determine the rest. When the risks get higher in some situations, as Giunta’s, soldiers don’t stop to calculate the odds and are certainly not seeking rewards.
This kind of selfless behavior is at the other end of the human spectrum from politics, where everything is done not out of a sense of duty to others, no matter what the consequences, but for calculated self-advantage.