Today, on Memorial Day, Americans take account of our collective debt. We recognize, honor and remember those who have died while defending this nation, taking stock of all we owe to them.
Memorial Day is a solemn occasion, acknowledging members of the armed forces who have sacrificed for the United States. While Veterans Day on Nov. 11 honors all who have served in the U.S. military, Memorial Day recognizes those who have been killed in that service. It calls for reflection amid the barbecues and baseball games that have come to be associated with the unofficial start of summer.
As author Tamra Bolton is credited with saying: “This is the day we pay homage to all those who didn’t come home. This is not Veterans Day, it’s not a celebration, it is a day of solemn contemplation over the cost of freedom.”
From the founding of the country during the Revolutionary War to recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 1 million Americans have been killed while protecting our nation’s interests and spreading her ideals of liberty and democracy.
Locally, the Clark County Veterans War Memorial monument at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site includes hundreds of names of those who have perished, ranging from the Spanish American War to the recent Global War on Terrorism. Those names represent heroes who have provided us with the freedoms we enjoy today.
At a time when this nation is particularly polarized along political lines, Memorial Day takes on added meaning. Many have died defending our right to embrace the freedoms afforded by the United States, our right to squabble among ourselves and our right to disagree about beliefs important and trivial.
While we can disagree at times about the morality of war, such disagreements should not reflect upon military members themselves; they are men and women who have answered the call from a nation in which they believe. As an old saying goes, we are the home of the free because of the brave.
Throughout our history, most of the brave have been volunteers. Even during the Vietnam War, an unpopular conflict that led many to dodge the draft, some sources claim that two-thirds of military members were volunteers.
The military draft was instituted during the Revolutionary War, and it has been halted and revived intermittently as necessary. The most recent draft was ended in 1973, and the United States has had an all-volunteer military since then. Today, there are about 1.3 million active personnel, carrying on a tradition of service that predates even the founding of the nation.
All of that is deserving of reflection today, even if it is somewhat incongruous that many Memorial Day traditions began in the former Confederate states following the Civil War. Honoring those who fought against the United States, Southern states led the way in choosing a day for decorating the graves of the fallen. The tradition spread in both the North and South, and soon became a national day of remembrance.
As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said during the mid-20th century: “Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.”
Memorial Day became an official national holiday in 1971, codifying the remembrances that had been a ritual of spring for more than a century.
We continue those remembrances today, thanking military members – and their families – for their sacrifice.
