Walter Russell Mead: Memorial Day ... The War in Iraq

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest.

How to commemorate those who have laid down their lives for their country?  Memorial Day wasn’t much of an issue in my childhood.  100 years after the Civil War, most white Southerners still considered this a Yankee holiday.  Robert E. Lee’s birthday, a state holiday across much of the South, got more press.  White folks didn’t go much to events like the annual commemoration of the Union prisoners who died in the Confederate POW camp in my father’s hometown of Florence, SC.

For me that changed when I went north to Pundit High School at the age of 13 on a full scholarship.  Memorial Day was a BIG event there; the 200 boys in the student body spent many spring evenings learning to march around the campus in preparation for the town’s Memorial Day parade out to the cemetery where the names of all the town’s war dead going back to the Revolution were read out.  A combination of precocious anti-Vietnam feeling and, I think, culture shock at the vast difference between Pundit High and everything else I had known led me to the conclusion that on conscientious grounds I should not march.

The best way, I argued to my put-upon parents and long suffering Headmaster, to commemorate the war dead was to stop the militaristic displays that made new wars and new deaths more likely.  The school made it clear: it was march or go home.  My parents told me it was my decision to make; I thought hard and eventually marched that spring and every spring thereafter until the time came to move on.  I wasn’t quite finished being adolescent about this national holiday.  The school band provided musical accompaniment as we marched, and I wrote French lyrics to the tune “Over There” which many of us sang to complain about the school food. “Pommes de terre,” it began, “pommes de terre; Içi on ne jamais mange que pommes de terre.“

Je ne regrette rien, but L’Académie Française has yet to call.

I’ve always thought that to march was the right choice, more than ever now that I’ve moved past the pacifism of my teen self.  But the question of how to commemorate those who have given their lives for our country is still a vexing one — and especially now, as the US role in Iraq winds down and we think about the 4,434 Americans who died there to date, the 32,074 who will carry the wounds they suffered there, and the hundreds of thousands who will carry the memories of their service through their lives...