From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND

Memorial Day After September 11
This year we'll remember more than just the military dead.

by DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, May 24, 2002 12:01 A.M. EDT

This Monday marks the first Memorial Day after September 11. So now we who have forgotten or never knew will relearn or discover the meaning of Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is a day of the dead, and in recent years many of us came to conclude that a nationally declared break from our busy days was too personally valuable and useful to spend thinking about the dead. Memorial Day for some has become a day to shop or sunbathe undisturbed by the dead who fell in wars.

Our times are not unique in this way. In 1895, the Gilded Age, Oliver Wendell Holmes addressed the graduating class of Harvard University about remembrance and war. It was one of two great Memorial Day speeches delivered by Holmes, who had fought in the Civil War. In Cambridge he told his young audience:

"Although the generation born about 1840, and now governing the world, has fought two at least of the greatest wars in history, and has witnessed others, war is out of fashion, and the man who commands attention of his fellows is the man of wealth. Commerce is the great power. The aspirations of the world are those of commerce. Moralists and philosophers, following its lead, declare that war is wicked, foolish, and soon to disappear. . . . There are many, poor and rich, who think that love of country is an old wife's tale, to be replaced by interest in a labor union, or, under the name of cosmopolitanism, by a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost. . . . " Still, come 1917, a generation served.

There are Web sites dedicated to Memorial Day. One of the best is www.usmemorialday.org, tended by David Merchant of the University of Tennessee. There, one may learn the proper way to display the flag, the words to Taps and read the extraordinarily moving oratory this day has elicited since the Civil War.

Chief among reasons for such formal remembering is that in wars men, and now women, die in large numbers. Some 1.8 million soldiers have died in our wars. But in the events and military campaigns of the past year, death is reversed: Large numbers of America's civilians die, fewer of its soldiers.

The declining number of military casualties, many fewer in Afghanistan than even the relatively small number who died in the Gulf War, is due mainly to gains in the efficiency of battlefield technology. Still, a belief persists among some that America's commitment to achieving its political goals in war requires that our leadership show its willingness to "accept" battlefield deaths in quantity; because only in this way will we discover whether the American people are willing to endure the pain and thereby extend the political support necessary to achieve the great goals set as justification for large military commitments. But by that measure, I think the commitment has been made. On September 11.

This week, the government has been issuing warnings about imminent acts of domestic terror, and here in New York City we see police on the street corners and at the bridges (and almost every day a suicide bomber blows up innocent civilians in Israel's public places). We are dealing with something unprecedented in modern history--individuals willing to transform their beings into bombs who then try to make weapons of war and politics out of the obliterated pieces of other people.

The civilized world is at some sort of turning point. Our soldiers shoot at their soldiers, and their soldiers shoot at our civilians. Their terror, it seems, won't stop until we stop them. And so until V-T Day arrives, the White House warns that more of us may have to die. Well, more than 3,000 of us have already died--in lower Manhattan, in Washington and in rural Pennsylvania--and I believe that the circumstances of this new war justifies extending the honors of Memorial Day to these dead.

On Sunday at 9 p.m., Eastern Time, (and again Tuesday at 10 p.m.), HBO will broadcast a strong film it has made about September 11 in New York City. It is hard to watch, but worth making the effort to watch; and if it is too hard to take, one can always walk away.

The short (hour-long) film is essentially a coherently edited collage of footage of that day and its aftermath taken by some 100 professionals and amateurs who pointed digital camcorders at what was in front of them. I thought I understood what happened that day, but now I know it better. In a conversation after the press viewing, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani aptly described what you will feel after watching: "Incredible anger." Mr. Giuliani says he'd like to tour Europe with the HBO film, a good idea.

In 1868, Gen. John Logan attached a brief but beautiful statement of purpose to General Order 11, creating a day of memorial observance: "Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time."

September 11 has its own passionless mound; it's a huge hill in a famous landfill called Fresh Kills on Staten Island. The hill's name, an invention of bureaucratic beauty, is simply "1/9," and it's where tons of the often human remains of that day have been hauled for seven months. I continue to believe the most appropriate tribute we could pay these innocent dead would be to build a lasting national cemetery around their remains on that hill in Staten Island. The living would gather there in quiet, away from the noisy city, to honor them each Memorial Day, as will happen this weekend in 120 national cemeteries.

Some say Memorial Day should be reserved for those whose job it is to risk death for country. The larger point, I think, is that all the honorable national virtues that made men willing to sacrifice themselves in our past wars have, of a sudden, manifest themselves across America since September 11. We have a volunteer army now, which the Pentagon prefers, but one effect of that efficiency is to separate these professionals from the rest of us, except at wartime. We lose track of them and their important purpose, and when Memorial Day arrives, we (though not all) forget.

That's not bloody likely again in our lifetime. On September 11, four planeloads of Americans were made prisoners of war and were executed in that war. A moment or two Monday is the time to honor them, and all in our history who have ever been like them.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

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