The most evil and tragic of human enterprises is war. Memorial Day should be a day of somber reflection on the terrible (and almost always avoidable) costs of war: All of the young people sent to fight and suffer and die, and the even greater number of noncombatants who also have their lives destroyed. 90% of all deaths in war are civilians. According to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the civilian to soldier death ratio in wars fought since the mid-20th century has been 10:1, meaning ten civilian deaths for every soldier death. This ought to be their Memorial Day too.

As Tim O'Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.”

The only exception I can think of to this is the tale of Desmond Doss, who joined the Army in WWII to be a combat medic, but refused to carry or use a weapon (his life was the subject of the 2004 documentary The Conscientious Objector, and the 2016 Oscar-winning film Hacksaw Ridge). Jesus said "Blessed are the peacemakers [not the war-makers]; for they shall be called the children of God." Matthew 5:9