The View From Here . . .

By Bob Morgan, Jr.

This Monday will be Memorial Day, a day most of us spend on such activities as barbecues, shopping, sporting events or just hanging around the house. However, it is also very appropriate to spend a little time on the purpose of the holiday - remembering the members of the United States military who lost their lives defending our country.

Memorial Day, formerly named Decoration Day, was founded after the Civil War, an extremely bloody struggle that claimed the lives of about 625,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, a very high percentage of the combatants. But there were many major struggles to come. United States casualties in World War I exceeded 116,000; in World War II, 405,000: in Korea, 36,000; in Vietnam, 58,000; in the present Iraq War, 4000. And thousands of soldiers lost their lives in smaller military campaigns over the years.

There are many monuments to this sacrifice. In Gettysburg, site of the most important battle of the Civil War, we see the field that President Abraham Lincoln dedicated in his famous address "as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live." The Vietnam Memorial in Washington contains the name of each fallen soldier on a black wall.

The memorials are not limited to the American mainland. On a trip to France with my late wife, Maureen, we visited a D-Day cemetery in Normandy, where rested many of the casualties of the epic invasion of June 1944. It is a staggering sight, with row after row of crosses (and not a few Stars of David) and somber music in the background. You could not help remembering that each occupant of a grave had a family who must have been devastated by losing a son (or occasionally perhaps a daughter), and you hoped that maybe the family was at least able to take at least some comfort that the sacrifice, which helped remove Hitler and the Nazis, was not in vain.

Nor have all the wars in which our soldiers have lost their lives been popular ones. The Civil War was deeply unpopular in some quarters, with draft riots in New York and other places and significant support in the North for the Confederacy by the so-called Copperheads. Indeed, President Lincoln expected to lose the 1864 election until the Union victory at Atlanta in September. The Korean War severely damaged President Truman's popularity. Vietnam led to the rise of the "counterculture" and caused President Johnson not to seek another term, and now President Bush's administration is suffering from great disaffection about the war in Iraq. Even in the generally popular World War II, the Good War, there was an enormous weariness at the end, which made so many people favor ending it by atomic attack on Japan.

But with or without great support on the homefront, American soldiers have labored on, risking their lives so that this country might remain the bastion of freedom and democracy that it is. And some of our warriors have given the supreme sacrifice. It is only fitting that we take a moment on Memorial Day to remember the price they paid for our liberty.