Formerly known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day has its origins in May of 1866 in Waterloo, New York, where its citizens honored the Union war dead with flowers and flags placed at gravesites. First resisted by the South, the holiday gradually became a national “Decoration Day,” and, finally, our national official “Memorial Day” in 1967, with its traditional date of May 30 changed, in 1971, to the last Monday in May.
This year, on May 26, we will commemorate the U.S. men and women who have given their lives in military service to our country. We often speak of our war dead as “fallen comrades” because historically the goals and morality of the wars they fought in were unified and reflected in the commitment of our citizens to its leaders and national purpose.
Then, with Vietnam, we witnessed a divide in this unity, a separation between an administration’s interests and the perceptions of a majority of citizens who had become disenchanted with the war, and distrustful of the government that prolonged it. Protests became loud and widespread, and our national leaders finally responded to the outrage of grassroots demands, bringing the war to an end, albeit without national honor or satisfaction.
With the Iraq war, we are witnessing citizen perceptions widely at odds with government interests and government rhetoric. The three reasons that President Bush originally gave for invading Iraq—that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Qaieda, and that Iraq posed an imminent military threat to the U.S.—all proved false. Post-invasion administration rhetoric made other spurious claims: that we invaded Iraq to stem terrorism, and that we were in Iraq to shift its tribal populace to a democracy and liberate its people.
These later claims have also proven false: world-wide terrorism has swelled its ranks with new recruits since 2003, the tribal cultures of Iraq are, if anything, further from embracing democracy than ever before, and rather than liberating the Iraqis, we’ve contributed to the collapse of their infrastructure and driven them toward more sophisticated forms of corruption.
But the greatest tragedy of this dishonest war is its cost in human lives: at this writing, 4076 American military have been killed, and approximately 50,000 more sent home with wounds they’ll contend with the rest of their lives. (Additionally, reports in British and American medical journals provide estimates of between 300,000-600,000 Iraqis killed, most of them civilian non-combatants.)
And to further debase any claims to a just and honorable war, we have the many thousands of returning veterans suffering with P.T.S.D., post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychological condition precipitated by a terrifying situation for which one is unprepared—war, rape, a sudden violent accident—and is characterized by nightmares, anger, emotional detachment. The RAND corporation estimates that at least 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will suffer with P.T.S.D. or major depression.
It is almost unbelievable that a current nominee for the U.S. Presidency has vowed to continue this war, despite the wishes of more than 70 percent of the American people, at a financial cost of 3 billion dollars each week, and the immeasurably greater cost in human lives. On this Memorial Day, May 26, then, let us honor our fallen comrades from all wars with a new determination to bring the Iraq debacle to a close, and thus to restore a reasonable measure of morality and simple decency to our nation and its historic role in the world.
Alan Lichter is County Councilman from Orcas Island, Council Liaison to the Veterans Advisory Committee and a Veteran.
