Opinion | How should we honor the dead of our failed wars?

About ten years ago, as the war in Afghanistan was slowly and painfully winding down, I was walking through Arlington National Cemetery with a Marine veteran and a relative visiting from Ireland. We walked past rows of pristine white graves where the dead had died from all the wars, just and unjust, that made and rebuilt this country, and my relative told us he found it very moving; he had not expected it. Perhaps he had imagined it to be more bombastic or more overtly militaristic, and he was struck by the beauty, the serenity and the quiet dignity of the place.

So we took him to Section 60 to see some of the newest graves. They were graves of children born in the 90s. I told him the sight filled me with anger. These young lives thrown into a poorly fought war where even their deaths at this late date are barely noticed. Just the background noise of a global superpower.

A few years later, in 2021, the Afghanistan war finally ended. With it came the deaths of some American children of the 2000s. Added to the military failure was a moral failure that put tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with us at risk in the country now completely controlled by the Taliban. The last Marines to die were killed in a suicide bombing at a gate to Kabul airport that killed 11 Marines, a Marine medic, a private, and about 170 Afghan civilians. The Marines were trying to manage the chaos of the poorly planned evacuation of Afghans from Kabul—basically a humanitarian mission to help those we had failed. A week before her death, one of the Marines, Sergeant Nicole Gee, posted a photo of herself holding a baby in Kabul and captioned it, “I love my job.”

America responded to those deaths with a drone strike on a vehicle in Kabul that the military claimed was carrying ISIS members planning to carry out another attack. But in a twist that seemed grotesque and emblematic of so many of our failings, it turned out to be carrying an Afghan aid worker. The blast killed the aid worker and his relatives, including seven children. The kind of people the Marines were trying to help died.

How do you remember the dead of a failed war? At Arlington, it’s easy to feel your heart swell with pride as you pass certain graves. Here are the heroes who ended slavery. Here are the patriots who defeated fascism. We think of them as inseparable from the cause for which they gave their lives. The same cannot be said of more morally questionable wars, from the Philippines to Vietnam. And for the dead of my generation’s wars, the dead I knew, the reasons they died do not fit the honor I owe them.

I sent many Marines to Afghanistan, a war I could have gone to but avoided. Most of the time they were young. That’s what Hollywood gets wrong most often when it casts grown men to play America’s best killers. Look at a Marine infantry platoon, many of whom joined at 17 or 18, and you see boys. Boys who haven’t yet become cynical. Some discover it mid-tour. Some keep that idealistic flame burning through multiple tours. And some die before it can be extinguished.

For many of the children I saw, their mission was important, and so their mission should be important to all of us as we remember their deaths. And the mission was a disaster. Memorial Day should be marked by sadness and patriotic pride, yes, but also by a sense of shame. And, although that feeling has faded for me over the years, by anger.

A few months after the fall of Kabul, I went to the Bronx to visit a war photographer I admire, Peter van Agtmael, who was showing a group of adult learners at the Bronx Documentary Center an exhibition of his photographs from 9/11 to the present. The photographs are now compiled in the book Look at the USA.

“I just came back from Afghanistan, and it’s controversial to say this, but it’s beautiful,” he told the group. “It’s beautiful to see Afghanistan at peace.”

Nice. I thought of a Marine in 2009, just returned from Afghanistan, hollow-eyed and recounting in a monotone voice how his best friend had taken a bullet to the head in these beautiful parts of the country that are now at peace. What would he think of such a claim? Around me, I saw on the walls a burned soldier in a combat hospital, the arm of a Trump supporter climbing over a wall at the Capitol on January 6, the dust cloud from an improvised bomb explosion in Iraq.

Towards the end of the gallery, a huge print hung high above. If you craned your neck, you could see a homeless encampment in Las Vegas, and if you craned your neck even further, you could see an F-16 fighter jet, an aircraft costing tens of millions of dollars, flying overhead. In the midst of our national forgetfulness of wars, there was something haunting about seeing this depiction of America in the South Bronx, in a community whose struggles have so often been subject to oblivion, erasure, and indifference. And, God, it was painful.

In the past, when I have thought of those recently deceased, I have told myself that service to country, service to the death, is such a great sacrifice that it dwarfs all other issues. The issue does not matter so much when the fallen I knew served bravely, cared for their comrades, and preserved their honor. But I have come to the conclusion that it is ultimately disrespectful to the dead to ignore the complexity of their wars. We owe it to the dead to remember what was important to them, what ideals they had, and also how those ideals were betrayed or did not reflect reality.

This Memorial Day, as I prepare to march with my sons in our local Memorial Day parade, our country is in the midst of the most divisive antiwar protests since the early days of the Iraq War, protests that my friends characterize as either “objectively pro-Hamas” or “against an undeniable genocide.” Questions that have long been dormant about how we use our power and who we help kill feel like current political issues again (even if we don’t talk much about actual American military operations or the soldiers who have most recently died at the hands of Iranian proxies). The debate is fierce and angry.

Good. What a good, uncomfortable, painful national mood to remember the dead. This year, when I remember them, I will remember not only who they were, but the scraps of memory dredged up from decades past. I will remember why they died. All the reasons they died. Because they believed in America. Because America had forgotten them. Because they were trying to impose a different way of life on people from another country and another culture. Because they wanted to take care of their Marines. Because the mission was always hopeless. Because America could be a force for good in the world. Because Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden didn’t have a grand plan. Because it’s a dangerous world and someone has to kill. For college money. Because the Marine Corps is damn cool. Because they saw Full Metal Jacket and wanted to be Joker. Or Animal Mother. Because war could offer a new hope for Iraq, for Afghanistan. Because we earned the hatred of others with our cruelty and indifference and carelessness and hubris. Because America was still worth dying for.