This weekend, we observe Memorial Day, a national day of remembrance first established by General John A. Logan’s “General Order No. 11,” issued on May 5, 1868, by the Grand Army of the Republic. The order declared:
The 30th day of May 1868 is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers and otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.
Logan’s order codified a practice that was already widespread across the country. In the years following the Civil War, Americans from both the North and South began gathering to honor the fallen. Logan provided that instinct with formal significance and established a national calendar.
In 1998, while serving as a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, I had the honor of delivering the city’s annual Memorial Day address at City Hall. In those remarks, I warned that the true meaning of the holiday was slipping away.
Memorial Day permits us to enlarge the individual soldier’s view — giving broader meaning to the sacrifice that was accepted by some but offered by all.
Memorial Day had become little more than a three-day weekend. For many, it marked the start of summer — just another excuse for a cookout. But that was never the intent.
The holiday was established to solemnly reflect on the lives lost in service to the country. It offered catharsis for those who fought and survived. And it served as a national promise to remember those who gave everything so that the republic — and the principles that sustain it — might live.
A long history of sacrifice
I argued that Americans have forgotten how to honor their war heroes and remember their war dead. My friend and fellow Marine “Bing” West made the point forcefully in his powerful book on Fallujah, “No True Glory.” Stories of battlefield courage, he wrote, must “be recorded and read by the next generation. Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”
During my remarks, I recalled acts of heroism from the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam. I spoke about a grieving mother who had written to me after her son — one of my Marines — was killed in Vietnam in May 1969. I asked, rhetorically: Why do men like those Marines under my command willingly fight and die?
Glen Gray offered one answer in “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle”:
Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their posts and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale.
Gray’s insight matches my experience. In the heat of combat, soldiers don’t talk about ideology. They think about each other. They fight to protect their brothers.
And yet, while the individual soldier’s focus narrows to survival and loyalty, Memorial Day offers us the chance to widen that lens. It helps us see the larger meaning of sacrifice — accepted by some but offered by all.
Memorial Day gives the nation a chance to recognize those sacrifices and validate them through the only lens that matters: the founding principles of the American republic.
‘Mystic chords of memory’
I noted in 1998 that Pericles, in his famous funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War, gave meaning to the Athenian dead by praising the excellence of Athens. He honored their sacrifice by affirming the civilization they died defending.
President Abraham Lincoln did something similar four months after the Battle of Gettysburg. At the dedication of the cemetery there, he expanded on what he had previously called the “mystic chords of memory” in his first inaugural address — those chords stretching “from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”
Lincoln gave universal meaning to the particular deaths on that hallowed ground. He allowed Americans to understand Memorial Day through the lens of Independence Day — to see the end of those soldiers’ lives in light of the nation’s beginning and the purpose of the American republic.
I argued that the deaths at Gettysburg, throughout the Civil War, and in all of America’s wars must be understood in relation to the founding principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Throughout history, countless brave soldiers have died fighting for causes that were unjust. Americans, by contrast, are fortunate. We can anchor the sacrifice of our fallen to a moral proposition: that all men are created equal.
Some critics accused me of glorifying war — of sentimentalizing conflict, justifying unjust campaigns, and trivializing death. But that critique misses the point. Soldiers enlist for many reasons. But almost all are motivated, at least in part, by a sense of duty, honor, and love of country.
That love of country — patriotism — is under constant attack. Critical race theory and the 1619 Project insist that America’s founding was corrupt and its principles invalid. But they’re wrong. A country built on decent principles, however imperfect its journey, remains a cause worth defending — and, if necessary, dying for.
My intention was never to trivialize individual loss. The death of a soldier marks the end of youth, promise, and joy. No speech or philosophy can console the family left behind. The mother who wrote to me after losing her Marine son in Vietnam carried a grief no words could ease.
Her anguish reminded me of Kipling’s “Epitaphs of the War,” especially the fourth verse, “An Only Son”:
“I have slain none but my mother;
She (blessing her slayer) died of grief for me.”
Kipling, too, lost his only son in World War I.
But as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in his Memorial Day address of 1884:
Grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death — of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
So by all means, have that burger this weekend. Enjoy the cookout. Go to the beach. But also take some time to remember to honor those who died to make your weekend possible.
Opinion & analysis, Memorial day, John a. logan, Civil war, Three-day weekend, Bing west, Naval war college, Vietnam war, Marine corps, World war ii
