A Proper Memorial

     Notwithstanding the quibbling over the differences among “wars,” “police actions,” and “operations,” here is a partial list of the military actions in which Americans have fought:

1. The Revolutionary War
2. The War of 1812
3. The Mexican-American War
4. The Civil War / War Between The States
5. The Spanish-American War
6. World War I
7. World War II
8. The Korean War
9. The Vietnam War
10. The Grenadan Invasion
11. The Panamanian Invasion / Operation Just Cause
12. Persian Gulf War I / Operation Desert Storm
13. The Afghan War / Operation Enduring Freedom
14. Persian Gulf War II / Operation Iraqi Freedom

     Those are merely the ones I can remember at this early hour. There have been others.

     Four of the clashes enumerated above involved fighting on American soil. If the fourth is eluding you, it was World War II. Hawaii was an American protectorate even then, and the Japanese did assault Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Archipelago as well. The other ten, and the smaller military operations whose names are absent from the list owing to my inability to remember them, were fought elsewhere.

     Many of the public service pitches about Memorial Day include statements that Americans who fought in our wars did so “to protect our freedom.” Even if we leave aside the question of just how much freedom remains to us in this Year of Our Lord 2019, it is morally imperative that we ask, seriously, and with due consideration both for possibilities that did not materialize and for the feelings of those who lost family members in them:

How do you figure that?

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     America’s armed forces are the finest that have ever existed. The young Americans who populate it, regardless of their individual reasons for taking the oath, are the very best of us. When called upon, they go where they’ve been sent and do what they’ve been told – superbly. In every combat action on record they’ve performed prodigies that have baffled the military minds of other lands.

     We’ve lost a great many of those young lives. If the Civil War be included, the count is well over a million. Any decent person must pray that they were not wasted, in some ultimate sense. And to be perfectly fair, most of the combats in which American forces have taken part were more popular than not. Yes, even World War I and Vietnam.

     But it takes a severe stretch of the terms involved to propose that the World Wars, the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts, and the later actions were “to protect our freedom.” They may have been geostrategically wise, though there is legitimate disagreement about several of them. They may have protected various extraterritorial interests, or the interests of nations allied to us. But they correlate with the diminution of Americans’ freedom, not with its preservation…and certainly not with its expansion.

     If the subject of interest is the motivation behind American engagement in those combats, let it be said, plainly and at once: the protection of Americans’ freedom was nowhere near the minds of those who sent them forth to do battle.

     Over and over, our men at arms have gone forth. They fought, suffered, bled, died – and prevailed. Words cannot express the praise and honor we owe them. But the political classes that dispatched them to foreign combats cannot reasonably be thought to have been concerned with Americans’ freedom.

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     We owe our fallen men at arms a grateful remembrance on Memorial Day. But let us also be mindful of something less praiseworthy: the willingness of old men in suits, seated in comfortable chairs in places well removed from the hazards and terrors of armed combat, to send them forth for reasons about which they have been less than honest.

     The armed power of our nation is not a toy. It consists of lives: mostly young lives, filled with possibility and promise. It ought not to be flaunted or brandished for reasons not vital to our nation. It certainly ought not to be flung about for “prestige,” or to establish or defend a “zone of influence.”

     I have a number of young friends who are at arms. I don’t ever want to read about their deaths, especially not if they were sent forth for “prestige,” or for the protection of some country whose citizens disdained to defend themselves.

     Consider this powerful line from Michael Bay’s movie 13 Hours, spoken by John Krasinski playing security contractor Jack Silva:

     “What would they say about me? ‘He died in a place he didn't need to be, in a battle over something he doesn't understand, in a country that meant nothing to him.’”

     Four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya, fighting to protect the lives of other Americans. Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were former Navy SEALs; Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith were civilians. Imagine the grief of their families. Try, though you must fail, to imagine what their families must have suffered over those deaths in places they didn’t need to be. There have been far too many such deaths, and far too many such families.

     Remember and reflect.