A tribute to the valiant: They gave their lives for us

Onward marches the Big Parade, forever into the somber beyond. A column of the young and the brave. Of the dutiful.

When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can!

- Emerson

Called by duty, gone to war. Gone to flowers.

On this day, we pause to mourn all those who did not come home from the battlefields.

The dead of this war.

The dead of the last war.

The dead of all past wars.

To honor their sacrifices. To humbly offer them our gratitude and our prayers. To assure their loved ones that we, the living, do not forget.

Cannot forget. Must not forget.

In Afghanistan, a war that began after 9/11, almost 2,500 American lives were lost, and half that many allied troops. Last summer’s withdrawal was unacceptably chaotic and bloody, the takeover by the Taliban shameful, but that war is now over. May the 13 U.S. casualties suffered in 2021 be the last.

So too is it over in Iraq, where 4,586 Americans lost their lives between 2003 and 2020.

Others fight and risk and give their lives elsewhere in shadow wars, unconventional, undeclared, but every bit as real, as well as battlefields unnamed and unknown.

Without the gallant likes of these heroes, the horrors visited upon the United States on that lovely late summer morning in 2001 might well already have come again.

The measure of these wars, as with all the wars this nation has fought, will be taken by the children.

Your children. Our children. And their children.

And those whose loved ones are remembered here today.

Loved ones who now march in the Big Parade. Loved ones who now live on eternally, in the aching hearts left behind.

Here, on another Memorial Day, in fields of flowers, we salute and celebrate our unforgotten.

They who donned the uniform and wore it dutifully while they lived.

They who will surely wear it proudly for all the rest of time.

Forevermore. As the Big Parade marches on, into the beyond.