L.A. Liberty

Memorial Day in Wartime - A Morbid Groundhog Day →

Another Memorial Day. Of course it’s been around for 103 years, but this is our ninth during wartime, which means we’re simultaneously honoring dead soldiers, while were putting new ones in the ground at Arlington Cemetery.

As of Friday, 4,454 American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq; 1,595 in Afghanistan. That doesn’t seem like a lot when you consider the more than 58,000 dead in Vietnam and over 415,000 killed in World War II, but we know that today’s singular medical capabilities have allowed for tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines to live today who wouldn’t have made it off the battlefield 40 years ago. Let’s just say it’s been a war of a hundred thousand casualties. …

[P]erhaps more than ever, today’s Memorial Day only underscores, even exacerbates a certain kind of malaise in America today, one more akin to feeling as though one is stuck uncomfortably in a Twilight Zone episode, where time never advances, perhaps worse: we are reliving the same Memorial Day over and over again. …

We’ve been told repeatedly over the course of nearly a decade that the military is “making progress,” that it’s halting the enemy’s “momentum” in Afghanistan. But the progress is “fragile and reversible,” so just give it more time. …

So Congress gives its routine assent to endless war, despite all the red flags. The money flows. We make the same mistakes. The dead are buried. We honor them at the next Memorial Day. …

[A]t the rate we are going, Memorial Day 2014 could come and go and there will still be dead soldiers, protests in the streets, creeping civilian death tolls, veterans killing themselves and neglect at the VA. There will be the obligatory hand-wringing, the stern vows of reform by politicians, Rolling Thunder and a pledge or two for peace – until the next Memorial Day, when we do it all over again. …

We know this war policy is dead – Iraq and Afghanistan have given us nothing in return for 10 years of sacrifice. Yet we run from the truth each Memorial Day, papering over our own “sense of disquiet” with red, white and blue. In doing, so we see the same specter of our fate every year and choose to ignore it. Delaying, of course, the inevitable.

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