Memorial Day at 250

National Review Online

Monday, May 25, 2026

 

Americans have commemorated Memorial Day, originally “Decoration Day” for the decoration of military graves, since just after the Civil War. But Americans have been dying for their country before we were even an independent nation. And they die still today. On this day, we honor them all. Enjoy your barbecue or your beach day not in spite of those sacrifices but bearing in mind that they made them possible.

 

In the year of our nation’s 250th birthday, it is fitting to start with those who died to give it birth. The American Revolution, dragging on as it did for eight years, remains the costliest of all our wars in proportion to the population — a war much wider and more destructive per capita for Americans than the Second World War. About one of every 16 free American males of military age died for the nation’s birth. Thousands who died were amateur militia protecting their own communities, such as Doctor Joseph Warren at Bunker Hill. Others perished far from home, such as those who froze in the snows of Quebec in the winter of 1775 (under General Richard Montgomery, who was one of the lost) or who landed at Penobscot in 1779 in a vain effort to liberate Maine. Some, such as Casimir Pulaski, came from across the sea to sacrifice for a new nation they knew more as a cause than as a people. Men died in swamps and rivers and snows, in Brooklyn and the Carolina backcountry, of disease and privation and aboard prison ships. Patriots, all.

 

The roll has never stopped. Bladensburg, Maryland. Tippecanoe, Indiana. New Orleans. Mexico City. Muddy Flat, near Shanghai. Shiloh, Tennessee. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Little Big Horn, Montana. San Juan Hill, Cuba. The Argonne Forest, France. Archangel, Russia. Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Buna–Gona, New Guinea. Ploești, Romania. Anzio, Italy. Peleliu, the Palau Islands. Chosin Reservoir, Korea. Ia Drang, Vietnam. Beirut, Lebanon. Grenada and Panama. Ramadi, Iraq. Boz Qandahari, Afghanistan. Tongo Tongo, Niger. The current war in Iran has claimed lives on land and at sea and in the sky.

 

They died in selfless sacrifices: sinking in submarines, gutted in bayonet charges, completing one-way bombing runs, holding rifle fire against oncoming suicide trucks, charging into blasted craters and onto tropical beaches, throwing themselves on grenades for their fellows. Many were so very young. Commanders, like Montgomery, died with their men. Oliver Hazard Perry died off Trinidad. Teddy Roosevelt Jr. died in France, like his brother Quentin. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. died at Okinawa. More than 100 general officers died fighting for the Union in the Civil War, as well as colonels such as Oregon Senator Edward Baker and Bavarian émigré and Union College professor Elias Peissner.

 

War, and the kinds of sacrifice it demands, has always sat uneasily with the veneration of the rights and dignity of the individual that has been central to our identity since the Declaration. Wars are fought by communities for communities and their posterity, not by individuals for themselves. They have sometimes been fought by men conscripted to the cause. Even aside from George Patton’s famous dictum that the point of war is to make the other guy die for his country, passing few deaths at war (such as the sort we commemorate with the Medal of Honor) mean or accomplish very much on their own. The families of the fallen often struggle with the unfairness of that trade. Yet, collectively, the sacrifices of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have time and again contributed immensely to the nation and its people — and often to the whole of humanity. To paraphrase Churchill, so many owe so much to so few. Because our nation has always been a community over space and time, and not only an idea, we share our indebtedness to those who came before us, and who went before their time. May we never forget them or that debt.