Memorial Sunday of 2023 began with a spectacular sunrise over the Chesapeake, rather a blood red sky for remembering those who gave their lives for this country.
In his classic study of U.S. military experiences, the late Temple University historian Russell Weigley, Jr., reminded us how different our view of the norms of war and peace are from so much of the rest of the world. Americans believe wars anomalous, resolvable temporary conditions while so many other nations view peace as an elusive state rarely achieved. The rest of the world may well study history better than we do as wars do appear not only regularly but frequently.
Americans view war as an engineering problem, one to solve once and for all. Woodrow Wilson’s promise just over a century ago was that entering (and winning) World War I would be the war to end all wars. If only he had been as good at reading the realities of war and peace as he was at getting elected president, Wilson would have proven quite a visionary. The sad reality of the past century is that the United States found it necessary to ask its men and women into battle time after time, location following location across the globe.
Richard Kohn’s 1975 foundational study on how we created our military reminds us of the many tensions relevant from the 17th century arrival of Europeans (each group bringing particular philosophical strains on the state’s prerogatives) through the establishment of a new structure under the United States of America. Developing and deploying the armed forces have been intricate discussions throughout our history. It has always been a complicated balancing act.
The military was vital in World War II to preventing the expansion of Fascist states bent on intolerance of all types around the world. We held our nose in allying with similarly non-democratic regimes such as Stalin’s or Chiang Kai-shek’s, but the end justified the means for all but a few in our nation.
From 1947 to 1989, the United States then feared a similarly existential threat from the former Soviet Union on the heels of a bloody four year conflict against the Axis powers. A significant portion of that four decades also included U.S. forces in Southeast Asia where we saw a proxy war against local forces who, instead, saw themselves as nationalists bent on liberation; it was deadly in either case. This was a ‘cold war’ but a ‘hot’ for those in the military rather than a period of peace.
Kohn’s and Weigley’s works appeared roughly fifty years ago when both Southeast Asia’s war and ‘the draft’ ended. In that intervening period, the United States sent its armed forces into Iran to rescue hostages, to Grenada to evacuate medical students, to perform peacekeeping operations in Lebanon with heartbreaking effects, launched Operation El Dorado Canyon to remind Qaddafi of his vulnerabilities, into the Middle East to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, more peacekeeping with infuriating consequences in Somalia, and with some success in the former Yugoslavia. Those were all events between 1977 (when Indiana University published Weigley’s book) and the end of the 20th century.
We have seen a dizzying acceleration rather than a pullback in deploying U.S. forces across the world in the new century: Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, and various humanitarian operations in Liberia, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Haiti, and others.
Many analysts decry our lack of preparedness for further military operations in the western Pacific in the years to come. We also see our armed forces prepare for helping others in the face of undeniable dangers of climate change literally wiping out various areas or because few others have the capacity we have.
Each of these actions, deployments and missions consists of individual service members rather than some abstract blob known as ‘the military’. The purpose of Memorial Day is to focus on the memories of those who gave their lives for the nation, regardless of where or when or why they occurred. Some of those who perished did so because the nation conscripted them while others volunteered to serve. Regardless of the status of their service, each died for the ends the nation asked them to secure. They are gone; we must not forget them.
Please take a moment, if you haven’t, to recall the sacrifices we asked of those no longer with us. Some of those losses are so well-known while others so easily forgotten. But their sacrifices, the ultimate price in each case, were for us: a nation and for the citizens of that nation.
We would do well to never take any of that for granted.FIN
Richard H. Kohn, Sword and Eagle: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America (New York: The Free Press, 1975).
Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: a History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977)