Ten Years In, Remembering Our Wars

I enlisted in the Army a few months before then, in April of 2002, and when Bush spoke in Normandy I was still in Basic Training. Iraq hadn’t been invaded. Afghanistan was a wild west of Special Forces operators on horseback and tribal raids. Still reeling from the traumatic attacks of 9/11, we worried about anthrax letters, shoe bombers, and Weapons of Mass Destruction. We didn’t know torture was government policy. The Guantánamo Detention Facility had only been holding prisoners for just four months. The Patriot Act was less than a year old.

Today, Barack Obama is visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to pay honors to the 58,209 Americans who died in a protracted, controversial war in Southeast Asia, and to inaugurate the DOD’s 50th Anniversary commemoration of that same conflict. Only a week ago, NATO leaders met in Chicago to discuss the planned drawdown of forces in Afghanistan and the problem of how to end one of America’s longest wars, which itself is only part of our ongoing global war on terror—or rather, as it was rebranded in 2009, our “Overseas Contingency Campaign.” The NATO leaders in Chicago were confronted by thousands of protesters, including a handful of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who returned their medals in a symbolic gesture of repudiation and regret.

Memorial Day presents the chance, and the imperative, to ask these questions. Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, honoring and mourning the soldiers who died in the American Civil War. That the holiday now mostly marks the first big barbecue of the summer seems to fit with the fact that less has seen military service any time in the last 10 years. Why should most Americans spend the day in commemoration, when so few they know have served? Memorial Day calls upon us to remember the fallen, but for most the dead fell in the shadows of ignorance, confusion, and corruption. It’s hard to know why, how, or even what to remember beyond the traditional moment of silence at 3 p.m.