One somber way to think of Memorial Day is to count the number of those who have died in service of this great, good country. Official totals say that figure is at least 1,354,664. The number causes a lump in the throat and a very large twinge in the heart.
Still, numbers are rather antiseptic. They hide the individuals, cannot account for the pain and suffering, and pay no homage in themselves to the causes for which those individuals died. The numbers are sobering but not inspirational.
Each one of those individuals had a story. Each one had family, friends, and colleagues. All of them wore their nation’s uniforms, experienced fear, and suffered hardships. Death in service, even in abject fear, always carries some sense of the heroic. The heroism of some is legendary.
Consider Emil Kapaun, a Catholic priest who served as a front-line pastor in Korea. He refused to wait for the wounded to be brought from the lines back to him; instead, he frequently braved enemy fire to reach, tend to, and pray for the wounded. Once, he even pushed aside the weapon of a Chinese gunman who was about to finish off a wounded American, looked directly at the gunman, and then picked up the American to carry him back to safety. Captured with his unit, subjected to brutal marches and mistreatment as a prisoner of war, Kapaun cared for the sick and injured, pilfered food and firewood from the Chinese captors to spread among the prisoners, and defied the communists’ orders by holding a public service on Easter Sunday. Many Americans credited their survival to Kapaun, but he himself died in captivity. Some 60 years later, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Or consider William Pitsenbarger, who flew more than 300 rescue missions in Vietnam. Under fire one day in 1966, he loaded six soldiers onto a rescue chopper, tended to more wounded rather than evacuate, built stretchers from saplings and splints from vines, repeatedly fired to hold off the attacking Viet Cong, and eventually died in the crossfire — but not before another nine of his fellow soldiers were able to make it back to safety. He also earned the Medal of Honor.
On and on go the stories. On and on emerge examples of heroism above and beyond. The comforting news is that they all died serving causes that, whether wise or not, were at least more just than not, and often overwhelmingly noble.
In the Revolutionary War, they fought for an ideal of equal rights to representation and liberty, rights they correctly insisted are unalienable. In the War of 1812, they fought in defense of the rights to the open ocean, refusing to accept the noxious notion that neutral Americans could be captured on the high seas and impressed into service for a foreign power. In the Spanish-American War, it was undeniable that Spain was brutally repressive toward Cuba, whose independence the United States fought to guarantee.
World War I saw the U.S. fight on the side of republics against autocracies. World War II, of course, was a battle against unspeakable, totalitarian evils. So, too, on a smaller scale, and perhaps with some small ambiguities, were the wars in Korea and Vietnam. And so on until more recent times, when Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and al Qaeda all were vicious menaces, all of whom the U.S. opposed not for territorial gain, but for principles of human decency and freedom.
American men and women at arms died not for conquest but, broadly speaking, for humane conceptions of justice, idealistic but not falsely utopian. We memorialize them today not as numbers but as human souls by whose memories we are blessed, as they surely have been blessed by a loving God.
