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Memorial Day was family, barbecue, and a long weekend. It was the beginning of summer, the start of the homestretch before school ended, and an opportunity to wear my favorite red, white, and blue shorts that didn’t seem to go with any of my shirts, but such things didn’t matter on certain holiday. As a child, Memorial Day was nothing but joy.
I don’t fault my parents for not instilling a sense of what Memorial Day really meant. I don’t blame my schools for making it all about patriotism but neglecting to focus on the sacrifices. I grew up in a time when war wasn’t really a thing. The Cold War was a thing, but we were winning and without a bullet fired at our Cold War enemies. My first exposure to war was Operation Desert Storm. I was a burgeoning journalist as assistant editor of my high school newspaper and arguing about whether our monthly publication should focus on the Iraq War. I lost and the cover headline, anticlimactic as it was two weeks after the war began, was simply, “WAR!”
It wasn’t until the next month when one of our students had an uncle who died in Iraq. At the time, the news from Iraq was nothing but good. Casualties were few and far between, but we had a local angle and I did the interview. It was my first experience with a relative of a lost soldier and it changed my perspectives on war forever. I felt an emotion from the girl who was close to her uncle. She admired him for his kindness and for his strength; I recall fighting back tears as she described the fun she’d had with him every 4th of July as his “co-captain” to light the fireworks.
The next time I thought of her was the following Memorial Day when, for the first time, I saw the holiday as a day of remembrance. It has remained as such throughout my life and I can attribute the direction my political philosophies have gone over the decades to that moment of clarity when I finally understood the barbecues and water skiing weren’t really what the holiday was about.
There are three truths I believe every American should know on Memorial Day, truths that may not be universally accepted but that I firmly believe should be. It is less about the loss of our brave soldiers and more about why they were willing to give their lives in the first place. Whether consciously or not, their sacrifices represent lessons Americans much continuously learn if we’re to truly honor or fallen heroes.
- War must be absolutely necessary or it shouldn’t be at all. It’s hard to argue for the necessity of any war since World War II. At the time, Americans generally didn’t want to go to war. We were still healing from the previous world war and even though the threat was greater this time around, the appetite for war was light. They hadn’t attacked us. Some can argue we waited too long, but Pearl Harbor was an unfortunate unifying event that brought us in. There hasn’t been a similar call to action in any of our subsequent wars, and the results are telling. We won WWII because we had no other choice.
- War should work to end a threat. If we are going to put our men and women in the armed forces in harm’s way, it needs to be with the goal of stopping our direct interests from being threatened. Is oil a reason to go to war? Unless there’s an existential threat associated with the oil such as a massive invasion across the Middle East, then no, financial considerations like oil are not a worthy threat. Did the Iraq War slow or stop terrorism? One can argue that it inadvertently increased the reach and resolve of terrorist threats against the United States and our allies. The lessons we’ve leaned from our most recent wars is that if our direct interests are not under attack, we should not get involved.
- If it must be war, go all out. One can argue we lacked the necessary resolve to see our way through the Vietnam War. I’m no historian, but my understanding is that we didn’t go in with the right intentions and when we were there, we didn’t go all out. The only way to truly win a war is to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight us now and in the future. For whatever internal or geopolitical reasons we had to hold back from absolute dominance during the Vietnam War, it was a mistake. It means that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
I know there are neoconservatives who would say our interests are broader than just the things that affect us directly. There are progressives and Libertarians alike who would say we don’t need to be anywhere other than within our own borders. There are plenty of arguments that can be made by every side that we don’t go to war enough or we should never go to war at all. But as I’ve matured in my understanding of foreign affairs in our current situation, I can say this with a certainty: Any war in which we are not clearly required to fight will not be popular at home or abroad.
In other words, any future war must be necessary with a valid path to tangible victory and we must engage in it with asymmetrical dominance.
This Memorial Day, it’s a time to remember the toll of war. Our soldiers gave their lives for our nation and our people, the ultimate sacrifice that the living can never truly appreciate. I am grateful for the freedom they have helped sustain for us all.
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