What to remember, what to memorialize, who to thank, and for what, including the making of war?

Xan rightly spends time trying to imagine the unimaginable agony of civilian victims of a military atrocity; read it here and weep.

In this war, we can be grateful that attempts to portray dissidents about war policy as undermining our troops, unAmerican, and desirous of an American defeat haven’t worked.

Why so many on the right are so determined to believe that fully half of Americans are traitors is the real mystery, (although Kevin Baker’s article on the June issue of Harper’s Magazines, “Stab In The Back” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, and more than worthy of the price of the magazines, which also features Art Speigelman on those Danish cartoons).

We aren’t traitors. We care deeply about our military, what happens to it, how it behaves, for what uses and causes it is employed.

What I usually do on Memorial day is to re-read Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d;” Yes, that Wal Whitman - a more-or-less openly Gay man, who spent the Civil War years in service to the wounded: You can find a copy of it here.

Even on Memorial Day, cannot we also remember to what terrible ends even a “good war” can take us?

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Another poet, Carolyn Forche, tries to understand just that here.

In November of 2003, I did a post about the complexities of saying “Thank-you” to the men and women of our Armed Forces that strikes me as sufficiently relevant to our situation today to provide a link to it.

The post includes live links to an extraordinary essay from inside the military, an extraordinary series about the early months of our military in Iraq, written by Nir Rosen, the same reporter who has written this deeply disturbing analysis, published this week in the Wa Po, of what we hath wrought in Iraq; the linked to series of 2003 will give the lie to the notion that Rosen is some kind of jihadi-loving leftist, instead of simply a superb reporter whose fluent Arabic has allowed him to go where others can’t.

Finally, the post contains a link to a Wa Po data base, “Faces of the Fallen;” as I did in November of 2003, I spent this morning with those faces and those brief bios, trying to imagine the pain of those left behind, able to welcome back only a coffin.

You can find it all by clicking here.