Horace, the Roman poet, wrote, "Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori" - it is a sweet and glorious thing to die for your country - and today as we eulogize and pay tribute to men and women who sacrificed their lives for their country, we should also consider the reasons for which they died and were willing to die. 620,000 men died in the bloodbath of the Civil War at a time when industrial weaponry was coming of age. In this war about slavery and the Union, Robert E Lee led the army of rebels of the breakaway Southern states who fought to preserve their way of life. In the Vietnam War over 58,000 Americans lost their lives supposedly to save us from communism. Two million Vietnamese died in that conflict. For the Vietnamese it was a war of independence from colonial rule. Their leader had the portrait of Washington hung in his office. Two million Japanese died fighting for their country and in August 1945, fourteen year old children in uniform, drafted into the Civil Defense to clear the fire lanes in Hiroshima, were either vaporized or dragged their skins, peeling off from the radiation, along the road before they died.
An estimated 70-85 million people died in World War 2. The numbers stagger the imagination, as does the pain of so many individual deaths. Even in the successful invasion of Mexico, which brought about the State of Arizona, over 13,000 men died. The lists of the dead of so many wars go on and on. People often had little choice. You were called up or you volunteered and you fought and you either died or you came home. National pride, a sense of duty, comradeship motivated you to fight and to do what you saw as your duty.
When we send men and women into harm's way, the cause must be just and the reasons valid. Even though the victors in a war declare themselves as morally right, the dead on both sides pay the price and often the reasons for war are morally ambiguous. Armed conflict should be the very last resort after every single political means has failed to secure peaceful agreement.
Today, on Memorial Day I raise my glass to toast and say thank you to all those men and women who died to give me freedom and I raise that glass a second time to all the men and women who did not die in a war because we had intelligent, knowledgeable politicians in Congress who understood the risks and preserved the peace. Thank you Senator McCain. We live on a tiny blue planet in a corner of the Milky Way. Our self destructive wars are meaningless against the backdrop of time.
In the meantime, given our present inability to get on with each other peacefully, intelligently and harmoniously, I find myself falling back on the old Roman adage "Si vis pacem, para bellum." 'If you want peace, prepare for war' in the hope that we, our children and our children's children and everyone else's children and each generation, having learned from the previous, can finally say, "Never Again." to war and can live their lives in peace.