Memorial Day

No one death saves a country. But an army’s collective willingness to risk death does. And in this sense every military death must be equal. Some deaths may be more tactically significant or glorious in the retelling or maybe saving of more lives. But each must fundamentally be equal. Because what do we say to the 19 year old in Vietnam who stepped on a land mine to no particular consequence in 1967 when he says to us “I lost my whole life in our common national enterprise. Who will speak for me? Who will remember what I did?” How do we keep that faith, make something more of it than the lost hope? Or the same in Iraq?

-- http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/05/memorial_day_1.php?ref=fpblg