The paragraph below is the final paragraph of Phil Klay’s Memorial Day column in the New York Times, The version I read had the headline”What Do I Owe the Dead of My Generation’s Mismanaged Wars?”

“In the past when I’ve thought about the recent dead, I’ve told myself that service to country, service unto the point of death, is a momentous enough sacrifice to overshadow all other questions. The cause doesn’t matter so much if the fallen I knew served courageously, looked after their fellow Marines and kept their honor clean. But I’ve come to feel that airbrushing out the complexities of their wars is, ultimately, disrespectful to the dead. We owe it to the dead to remember what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.”

The headline and the paragraph nicely pose the question of just what it is about Americans who died in wars that we should honor. In the paragraph I have chosen, Klay’s first option is “service to country…to the point of death.” These, says Klay, who have “served courageously,” have “looked after their fellow Marines,” and have “kept their honor clean.” [1]

Those are all personal attributes and all worthy of praise. But he has introduced another element by asking which of the wars in which these Americans served were “mismanaged.” If you look at the first paragraph above, you will see that the personal adulation is confined to first part, then there is the turning point—“but I’ve come to feel”—after which we get to the wars themselves and how we treat those wars.

One way we treat the wars, Klay says, is to “airbrush” them. Normally, airbrushing takes out unattractive features; features we would not want in a “picture” celebrating individual sacrifices. Airbrushing would be about the war, not about the soldiers. Then he goes on to say that it is disrespectful to the dead to do this airbrushing; that we need also to pay attention to “what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.”

I appreciate Klay’s raising a problem I had not considered. How to you honor the soldiers without honoring what they thought they were doing? But then, if the war itself betrayed them, how do you condemn the war while honoring the soldiers?

I really don’t know. It seems to me that we divide naturally into teams. The one team is a glorifier of soldiers as individuals. We honor them for the sacrifice they offered. The other team is a vilifier of the particular war in which the soldiers died. It was waged in error and terribly mismanaged and so on. As long as we do the work that our team, each team, has to do, there is not much stress and not much effort.

Doing both things, which is what Klay is after, seems hard to me and very much worthy of respect, whatever conclusion his work produces.

[1]”Clean” is not the most obvious choice of virtues to match with “honor”, but the first eight lines of the Marine hymn use a rhyme every other line that goes: Tripoli, sea, clean, and Marine. So the choice of virtue names is limited.