{"id":10199,"date":"2017-05-25T12:59:06","date_gmt":"2017-05-25T19:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10199"},"modified":"2017-05-29T00:07:44","modified_gmt":"2017-05-29T07:07:44","slug":"what-we-remember-on-memorial-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-we-remember-on-memorial-day\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Remember on Memorial Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

The obligation to honor the war dead has often conflicted with the need to make distinctions among them and their causes.<\/em><\/h3>\n

By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/p>\n

A few years ago I was honored to serve briefly on the American Battle Monuments Commission, whose chief duty is the custodianship of American military cemeteries abroad. Over 125,000 American dead now rest in these serene parks, some 26 in 16 countries. Another 94,000 of the missing are commemorated by name only. The graves (mostly fatalities of World Wars I and II) are as perfectly maintained all over the world, from Tunisia to the Philippines, as those of the war dead who rest in the well-manicured acres of the U.S. military cemetery in Arlington, Va.<\/p>\n

A world away from the white marble statuary, crosses, Stars of David, noble inscriptions and manicured greenery of these cemeteries is the stark 246-foot wall of polished igneous rock of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the mall in Washington. On its black surfaces are etched 58,307 names of American dead in Vietnam. They are listed in the chronological order of their deaths. The melancholy wall, birthed in bitter controversy at its inception in 1982, emphasizes tragedy more than American confidence in its transcendent values\u2014as if to warn the nation that the agenda of Vietnam was not quite that of 1917 and 1941.<\/p>\n

The Vietnam War may have reopened with special starkness the question of how to honor our fallen dead, but it is hardly a new problem in our history. As today\u2019s disputes over the legacy of the Civil War and the Confederacy suggest, it has never been enough just to lament the sacrifice and carnage of our wars, whether successful or failed. We feel the need to honor the war dead but also to make distinctions among them, elevating those who served noble causes while passing judgment on their foes. This is not an exclusively American impulse. It has deep roots in the larger Western tradition of commemoration, and no era\u2014certainly not our own\u2014has managed to escape its complexities and paradoxes.<\/p>\n

Our own idea of Memorial Day originated as \u201cDecoration Day,\u201d the post-Civil War tradition, in both the North and the South, of decorating the graves of the war dead. That rite grew out of the shock and trauma of the Civil War. In the conflict\u2019s first major battle at Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862) there were likely more American casualties (about 24,000 dead, wounded and missing on both sides) than in all the nation\u2019s prior wars combined since its founding.<\/p>\n

The shared ordeal of the Civil War, with some 650,000 fatalities, would eventually demand a unified national day of remembrance. Memorial Day began as an effort to square the circle in honoring America\u2019s dead\u2014without privileging the victors or their cause. The approach of the summer holidays seemed the most appropriate moment to heal our civic wounds. The timing suggested renewal and continuity, whereas an autumn or winter date might add unduly to the grim lamentation of the day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pericles’ Funeral Oration<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But could the distinctions so crucial to war itself really be suppressed? Consider the themes of the two greatest speeches in the history of Western oratory: Pericles\u2019 long Funeral Oration for the Athenian dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, delivered in 431 B.C. and amounting to some 3,000 words in most translations; and nearly 2,300 years later, President Abraham Lincoln\u2019s 272-word Gettysburg Address of 1863.<\/p>\n

Both statesmen agree that the mere words of the present generation cannot do justice to the sacrifice of the fallen young. Lincoln sees the talking and the living as less authentic commemorators than the mute dead: \u201cWe can not consecrate\u2014we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.\u201dPericles argues that even a notable such as himself has almost no right to assess the sacrifices of the dead: \u201cI could have wished that the reputations of many brave men were not to be imperiled in the mouth of a single individual, to stand or fall according as he spoke well or ill.\u201d<\/p>\n

By their ultimate sacrifice\u2014what Lincoln calls \u201cthe last full measure of devotion\u201d\u2014the mute war dead argue that even heroic men are less important than the eternal values of freedom and democracy that \u201cshall not perish from the earth.\u201d Such chauvinism assumes that democracies are by nature superior to the alternatives. Thus to Pericles, Athens was the \u201cschool of Hellas\u201d and for Lincoln America was \u201ca new nation, conceived in Liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

For both orators, the dead are the natural link between self-sacrificing forefathers and the present generation\u2019s own progeny, who at some future date may be called upon to emulate those who have died to perpetuate the nation. In this view, we are not quite unique individuals but part of a larger generation whose values and accomplishments are to be judged collectively and in comparison to what came before and will follow.<\/p>\n

Finally, both Pericles and Lincoln see war and its evils as tragically innate to the human experience. Conflict will demand sacrifices, in varying degrees, from each successive generation of free peoples. As the philosopher George Santayana more pessimistically put it, \u201cOnly the dead have seen the end of war.\u201d Both orators suggest that democracies and republics will always be the natural targets of aggressors who see their freedom as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be appreciated.<\/p>\n

The Western tradition of commemoration also includes a unique idea of individual moral exemption. As first articulated by Pericles, we overlook any defects of character of the war dead, attributing to one brief moment of ultimate sacrifice the power to wash away all prior moral faults.<\/p>\n

A noble death serves, in the words of Pericles, as \u201ca cloak to cover a man\u2019s other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as an individual.\u201d The great playwright Aeschylus wanted his epitaph to read only that he was a veteran of the Athenian victory at Marathon\u2014a battle where his brother fell.<\/p>\n

These themes still resonate in our own habits and rites. This Memorial Day the flags on graves in American cemeteries set the dead apart, in a special moral category that discourages any discussion of the bothersome details of their short lives.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Portrait of Abraham Lincoln
Source: Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pericles and Lincoln assume that the sacrifice of the war dead is enhanced by the nobility of their cause and the victories they have won. In the age of the Parthenon and Sophocles, democratic Athenians considered themselves superior to oligarchic Spartans, seeing vindication in their early successes (Athens would go on to lose the war 26 years after the great speech of Pericles). Similarly, the Union believed itself the moral better of the slave-holding South and would march to triumph under that banner two years after Gettysburg.<\/p>\n

For democratic peoples, it is difficult to separate victory and nobility from commemorations of the fallen. This is especially true when it comes to events that directly engage our own moral imperatives. In the case of the Civil War, we now tend to see the Confederate dead as faceless emblems of larger causes, not as unique individuals who wrestled with their own moral paradoxes. Yet we seem to think that future generations will not do the same to us, applying their own\u2014possibly quite different\u2014standards to the collective sacrifices of our generation.<\/p>\n

Herodotus, the Greek historian of the Persian Wars, saw armed conflict as a tragedy for all warring parties precisely because it was central to the human experience and thus endless. In obscene fashion, war inverted the natural order of peacetime by compelling fathers to bury sons. Pericles bluntly reminded us that the tragedy is not when we the middle-aged and old die but when the youth do, \u201cto whom a fall, if it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Railing at the loss of the nation\u2019s youth has thus long accompanied the tradition of praising noble sacrifice for a just cause. The historian Thucydides nearly wept over the young Athenians senselessly killed\u2014in the wrong place, at the wrong time, on the wrong mission\u2014by the tribes of wild Aetolia: \u201cThese were by far the best men in the city of Athens that fell during this war.\u201d When Lincoln said of the dead that they \u201cshall not have died in vain,\u201d he implied that the sacrifices of the aggregate Union war dead by November 1863 would be for naught if the North lost the war.<\/p>\n

The Roman lyric poet Horace in his Odes famously praised the ultimate contributions of Roman legionaries, declaring, \u201cDulce et decorum est pro patria mori<\/em>\u201d: \u201cIt is a sweet and fitting thing to die on behalf of the fatherland.\u201d Wilfred Owen, the English poet and veteran of the trenches of World War I (killed one week before the armistice), would have none of it. In the conclusion of his nightmarish signature poem, he bitterly channeled Horace:<\/p>\n

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
\nTo children ardent for some desperate glory,
\nThe old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
\nPro patria mori.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After the Somme and Verdun, Owen no longer saw clear moral winners and losers, only endless carnage without hope of resolution: hence the \u201cold Lie.\u201d Similarly scornful was the poet and critic Randall Jarrell\u2019s response to the contribution of Allied bombing to winning World War II. His poem \u201cThe Death of the Ball Turret Gunner\u201d ends with the verse, \u201cWhen I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, for all the carnage and senselessness in just and unjust wars alike, we don\u2019t mourn all war dead equally or find tragedy in every loss. Certainly the SS officers who were buried at Bitburg, Germany\u2014where President Ronald Reagan in 1985 caused a storm by visiting on the 40th anniversary of V-E Day\u2014were connected to the horrors of Auschwitz. And while there is something understandable in solemn visits of Japanese officials to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to honor the 2,466,532 names of the dead found in the Shinto shrine\u2019s \u201cBook of Souls,\u201d many of those men left a trail of 20 million dead throughout Asia and the Pacific from 1931 to 1945.<\/p>\n

I grew up in a Swedish-American family in which the name \u201cOkinawa\u201d went unmentioned, a campaign that was tactically unimaginative and strategically incoherent\u2014and yet aimed at finally stopping a murderous imperial regime. My uncle and namesake, Victor Hanson, a corporal in the 6th Marine Division, was killed in the last hours of the last day of battle for Sugar Loaf Hill.<\/p>\n

I inherited both Vic\u2019s college athletic equipment and a Periclean admonition from my father (who himself flew on 39 missions over Japan in a B-29) to \u201clive up to Vic\u201d\u2014without much elaboration other than the implicit advice that the only thing worse than fighting a dirty war on Okinawa would have been to lose it.<\/p>\n

I visit Victor Hanson\u2019s grave each Memorial Day in the nearby small California Central Valley farming town of Kingsburg, still in astonishment that such a mythical person, whom I never met, gave up his youth (and a long life ahead) for what we have now collectively become. Pericles hoped that such sacrifices would move the living of subsequent generations to a deeper appreciation of the greatness of Athens: \u201cfeed your eyes upon her from day to day, until love of her fills your hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Memorial Day we should remember that all commemoration is underpinned by ambiguities about the causes, conduct and aims of particular wars. No one has captured the heartbreak of the war dead more effectively than the Marine memorialist E.B. Sledge, who wrote \u201cWith the Old Breed,\u201d a horrific account of his nightmare on Peleliu and Okinawa.<\/p>\n

Sledge is sometimes simplistically described as an antiwar voice (\u201cSo many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.\u201d), but he did not end his gruesome story of combat with a universal denunciation of war. He finished instead with a solemn reminder\u2014somewhere between Horace and Wilfred Owen\u2014that circumstances count.<\/p>\n

His words are worth recalling as we cast our eyes over the endless fields of tiny flags we will again see this Memorial Day on the graves of Americans who gave their all for us:Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one\u2019s responsibilities and be willing to make sacrifices for one\u2019s country\u2014as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, \u201cIf the country is good enough to live in, it\u2019s good enough to fight for.\u201d With privilege goes responsibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The obligation to honor the war dead has often conflicted with the need to make distinctions among them and their causes. By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Wall Street Journal A few years ago I was honored to serve briefly on the American Battle Monuments Commission, whose chief duty is the custodianship of American military cemeteries abroad. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1112,194,99,1,102,347,576,34,339,307],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Ev","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11460,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-reminder-of-what-binds-us\/","url_meta":{"origin":10199,"position":0},"title":"A Reminder of What Binds Us","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 19, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review In these divisive times, one constant for all Americans has been the hallowed work of the American Battle Monuments Commission, the small and sometimes unheralded federal agency created in 1923 to establish, operate, and oversee foreign cemeteries of American war dead, largely from the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4355,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/are-they-in-the-army-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":10199,"position":1},"title":"Are They in the Army Now?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 24, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Cries of shortfall, exhaustion, and overstretch by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Magazine Figures on U.S. military recruitment just released for 2005 show that the Army missed its monthly announced goal, achieving only 75 percent of its anticipated enlistments for this May. The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2005"","block_context":{"text":"June 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/june-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5119,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-meaning-of-tet\/","url_meta":{"origin":10199,"position":2},"title":"The Meaning of Tet","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 1, 2001","format":false,"excerpt":"1968 Tet Offensive, Vietnam War by Victor Davis Hanson American Heritage A historian argues that in Vietnam America's cause was just, its arms effective, and its efforts undermined by critics back home -- and that this is how things must work in a free society. MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS AGO,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "2001"","block_context":{"text":"2001","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2001\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4955,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/doom-doom-and-more-doom\/","url_meta":{"origin":10199,"position":3},"title":"Doom, Doom and More Doom","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 7, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Should we trust past facts or present hysterics? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online What can we expect from the possible invasion of Iraq? Everything in war is of course uncertain \u2014 an awful time when the lives of thousands of soldiers hang in the balance, and brutal, dirty\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2003"","block_context":{"text":"February 2003","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2003\/february-2003\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2233,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/thoughts-on-the-hysteria-about-afghanistan\/","url_meta":{"origin":10199,"position":4},"title":"Thoughts on the Hysteria About Afghanistan","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Afghanistan is a messy war, but so far it has been conducted with a minimum loss of American life while achieving some important goals. We can argue about current strategies, fault what\u2019s been done in the past, deplore the length of the war, lament\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2009"","block_context":{"text":"October 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/october-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3892,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-the-western-way-of-war-dead\/","url_meta":{"origin":10199,"position":5},"title":"Is the Western Way of War Dead?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 8, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Not yet, but it may soon be irrelevant. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is now becoming trite to write of the American military \u201cfailure\u201d in Iraq. But recently this purported setback has been lumped together with the Israeli problems in southern Lebanon to suggest an end to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2006"","block_context":{"text":"September 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/september-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10199"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10212,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10199\/revisions\/10212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}