In a year fraught with emotion as we withdraw from Afghanistan, we may ask ourselves this Memorial Day: What do we owe our war dead?

Memorial Day is not about the living or even the veterans who died peaceably in their beds, whose service is commemorated on Armistice Day in November. Memorial Day, formerly Decoration Day, is about those who fell in combat. President Ronald Reagan observed, “We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. … But most of them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives — the one they were living and the one they would have lived.” How do we commemorate that double sacrifice? The question is harder to answer this year.