This is Arlington National Cemetery. There's a lot of people buried here. It's tempting to count this loss of life as wasted, but to do so discounts the opinion of those who gave their lives. If they thought it was for nothing, they wouldn't have sacrificed themselves to causes.

They didn't waste their lives. They bought something precious with them, whether it was the fall of the Central Powers in World War I, the remission of fascism in World War II, or the short, tenuous period after the withdrawal of American troops from Viet Nam but before the fall of Saigon. Waste can be found in German death camps, in the mass graves discovered in Iraq, in the corpse-clogged rivers of Rwanda, where the killing had no intent beyond the mass destruction of life, where death and extermination were themselves the primary goals and where ordinary people were the principal and primary targets. American soldiers die not to perpetrate that kind of atrocity, but to take down the people who do. It takes deliberate effort to ignore this distinction.

They didn't waste their lives, but we can waste what they bequeathed us. Behind our luxuries of safety and comfort that allow us to forget about our soldiers - if we so choose - we can pull back a curtain to witness the rituals of soldiers burying their own and handing folded flags to widows. If such images evoke a feeling of insignificance in the face of life and death and forces greater than ourselves - including moral forces - this reflects a recognition of the scale of sacrifice.

Labels: Sadness and Cemeteries