In honored glory on Memorial Day

Whether they fought -- or fell -- as a unit or carrying out orders alone, each of them was greater than the sum of his parts. They have defied description and no one has ever successfully categorized them. But America's enemies who used to underestimate them should have been taught well the first time.

None of them was particularly articulate (and the author has known many of them as only another veteran of combat can know a fellow human being). Ask them what they were doing, and if you got just a grunt, it meant it was none of your business -- if it were, they could be plain or profane as the need arose. They were there to do a job, and they carried it out, not without the scheduled number of gripes and complaints expressed in language unintelligible to noncombatants.

You could bet they kept their weapons clean and ready. You could take it to the bank each of them had an eye for survival -- for himself and his nearest buddy, if needed. And it was as certain as sunrise they'd be dreaming of home, feeling sorry for the poor sonofagun who wasn't going to make it back.

Each year, when springtime has already brought the message of hope and of resurrection, we pause to honor those who didn't make it back, Earlier, we visited Arlington once more, and stood at attention when the lone sentry trod the measured twenty-one strides before the Tomb of the Unknown. We looked down the carefully kept lawns of the Custis-Lee Mansion where now a quarter of a million of our dead lie in honored glory. And again, with the goose bumps on the back of the neck, came the feeling every survivor feels: guilt that they were taken and he is left.

As sentient human beings, we all know that some of the wars that took our fighting men were ill-conceived, dead wrong in morals and in principle. Yet they went, raising such a cause to the level befitting the ones who paid so dearly.

We all knew that many of our shipmates died as the result of someone's stupidity or sense of vanity. And we know that in Valhalla, where heroes know their utter reward, they must account to those who carried out their unwise and fatal commands.

We may mourn them, and must pause to pay tribute to them, whose love of life was as great as ours, whose widows and orphans knew the agonies of grief even as our own wives and offspring bade us welcome home. That is the essence of Memorial Day.