They Died for You

We reflect this Memorial Day, and others past and future, on the men and women who gave their lives in America’s wars. It is not a day to look for reasons, but to honor, as a Times writer did some time ago with these words:

”. . . The war with Mexico ending when its proud cadets chose leaping to their deaths before defeat on the doomed ramparts of Chapultepec; the bloody dwindling of the South’s confederacy, with Lee and Grant and Sherman fighting those last bitter battles that would stop at Appomattox in the spring; and Lincoln dying then--shot by a maniac--but not before he wiped away the shame of slavery and saved the Union of the states that was not yet a century old; the war with Spain--whatever else it did or didn’t do, it gave us Teddy Roosevelt and our self-esteem; the First World War, which was to save democracy but gave us Stalin, Hitler and their hideous atrocities; the Second World War, perhaps not done with yet, as wars and what comes from them go, but from it salvaged at besieged Bastogne one of the more defiant battle cries, the one word “Nuts.”

“And Korea and Vietnam. Whatever you may think of those in retrospect, where any young American has died, in any war, in any crummy little ambush anywhere, regardless of the cause of it, he died believing that he died for you. And did.”