The Weight of War: Honoring the Fallen — and Asking Who Among Us Has Truly Earned the Right to Send the Next Generation Into Battle
MEMORIAL DAY IS THE ONLY DAY RESERVED ENTIRELY FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT HERE TO OBSERVE IT.
Veterans Day belongs to the troops who came home — and who, most proudly, carry the duty of honoring the fallen comrades they could not bring back with them. Memorial Day belongs to the others.
THE FAMILIES OF THOSE WHO DID NOT COME HOME SURELY DESERVE TO KNOW, EACH NIGHT, WHETHER THEIR LOVED ONE’S DEATH WAS WORTHY OF THE SACRIFICE — A QUESTION ONLY THEY CAN ANSWER. BUT THEY ALWAYS DESERVE OUR RESPECT.
The numbers do not numb. They indict. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 651,031 American servicemembers have been killed in battle since the Revolution. Another 539,054 have died in service from disease and accident. Add the more than 7,000 lost since September 11 and the total exceeds 1.2 million dead in uniform.
One-point-two million numbers. One-point-two million families.
But the true arithmetic does not stop at 1.2 million. Each of those Americans had a mother and a father — that alone is 2.4 million parents who buried a child they had raised. Most had a brother or a sister, many had a spouse, a son or a daughter waiting at home, and every one of them had aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents who, in the years that followed, would remember the face that no longer appeared in the family photograph. Counted honestly, the number of Americans across our history directly broken by these 1.2 million deaths runs to fifteen million or more. The flag at a graveside is small. The grief it covers is not.
A TIME OF HEARTACHE
A mother who opened the door to two officers dressed in blue and knew before they spoke.
A father who could not finish the eulogy.
A young spouse handed a folded flag at a graveside.
A young child too small to remember the face of a parent, a brother or a sister they never got to know.
Honest
Politics
By Brent Lambi
Many names on many stones are the results on decisions made in Washington. The casualty lists were directly related by the signature of a Commander in Chief and the votes of a Congress. The grief at those gravesides did not arrive by accident.
Most of us, given enough years, learn the weight of losing someone we love. Grief becomes an accepted tax on the privilege of having lived. But to lose someone to a war that did not have to be fought is a different kind of grief. It does not soften. It hardens. And it leaves every one of those 1.2 million families with the same burning question.
“Was it really worth it?”
This is the question Memorial Day should make us reflect and ponder “did we do everything as a citizen and voter to mitigate this sacrifice in the past or in the future?”
TWO NEBRASKANS WHO KNEW THE WEIGHT
Senator Chuck Hagel earned two Purple Hearts as an Army infantryman in Vietnam, serving in the same squad as his brother Tom. Senator Bob Kerrey lost part of his leg leading a Navy SEAL team in 1969 and received the Medal of Honor and the Purple Heart.
When Hagel and Kerrey rose to speak about the use of force, they spoke with the moral authority of men who had bled under the flag they swore to defend. Hagel, a Republican, broke with his party on Iraq. Kerrey, a Democrat, was equally clear-eyed about what combat does to a soldier’s conscience for life.
NOT ALL UNIFORMS CARRY THE SAME WEIGHT
A second category of public officials deserves an honest accounting: those who put on the uniform but served entirely from a stateside base or a quiet rear-echelon posting. Their service is honorable. No modern army functions without quartermasters, clerks, mechanics and drivers.
Rash political action does not only cost American lives in uniform. It also produces preventable civilian deaths abroad — children, mothers and the elderly. In this writer’s opinion, those who have witnessed death and caused death in a war understand best that it must always be a last resort.
A soldier who pulled three years at a stateside motor pool and was honorably discharged has every right to call himself a veteran. What he has not earned — and what no honest combat veteran will tell him
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he has earned — is the moral standing to speak with finality about sending other people’s children into the kind of war that produces Purple Hearts and Medals of Honor.
Reporting death and witnessing death are different things.
THE DEFERMENT CLASS
Beneath both ranks of veterans sits a third class: the senators, representatives, governors and presidents who reached the highest offices in this country on multiple medical deferments, fortunate timing, well-connected fathers, or draft numbers that simply never came up. The list is bipartisan.
A bone spur here. A college deferment there. A National Guard slot quietly arranged while the sons of farmers, steelworkers and schoolteachers shipped out to a war their classmates of means would never see.
This is not an argument that service must be a prerequisite for office. It is an argument for honesty: the people most casually willing to send other people’s children to die in countries whose names they cannot pronounce are very often the people whose families never had to weigh that risk at the dinner table.
BENEATH THE DEFERMENT CLASS
There is one final disgusting category, and on Memorial Day 2026 it requires being named. Donald J. Trump received four educational deferments and a medical deferment for bone spurs during the Vietnam War, placing him by his own record squarely in the Deferment Class. That alone would not warrant naming him here.
What warrants it is what came after. By credible national reporting and the on-the-record testimony of his own former White House Chief of Staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly referred to the American war dead — the fallen heroes whose names are carved into the marble of Arlington and the stones of the American cemeteries above the beaches of France — as “suckers” and “losers.” That disrespect is repugnant to every standard of decency this country has ever claimed for itself.
And in this writer’s opinion, plainly stated: if you continue to support the disrespectful Donald J. Trump or the nominees he has installed in office, knowing what he has called the Americans who died bravely for the flag he asks you to salute, then — by this writer’s own opinion — you are a sucker, and you are a loser.
