During my final year of high school I opted to “early enlist” in service of my country. Few in my graduating class chose to do so. Most prayed for the compulsory draft’s lottery system to spare them, that someone else might be offered up. No one I knew thought military service was an especially compelling calling at that time. A year after the devastating setback of the Tet Offensive, the Vietnam War still raged on as the all-consuming focus of American politics. U.S. casualties were a mainstay of the evening news, each nightly broadcast underscoring our embarrassing inability to defeat a small undeveloped nation halfway around a world in which we thought ourselves all-powerful and invincible.

Why we were there no one could convincingly explain to me, then or all these years later. Something about a supposed domino effect that Vietnam’s civil war would unleash if we didn’t aid a repressive and corrupt ruling oligarchy in combating an evil communist inspired people’s revolution. Anti- war activist counter- propaganda claimed it was all about oil. Hindsight suggests it may have been nothing more than an earlier pissing match with China such as continues today, pursued by those in power who seem to believe in militaristic regime change simply for the sake of the ideological sport of it.

All I knew was that it made no sense to wage war against people that had no bone to pick with us. No way was there any imminent threat to the sovereignty of the U.S.. Yet, the majority of those wielding American power, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, wouldn’t back down no matter how embattled our former world esteem became or how many body bags returned to our shores.

For 12 years I’d been systematically prepped for college, but now the safety of that sheltered world was running out. Suddenly, all those years of the three Rs added up to figuring out how to prevent being sacrificed as another unheeded history lesson on the merits of being made cannon fodder. Continued educational reprieve from military service for some, when others unable would fall victim to a draconian draft, weighed heavily on what decision to make when the very fabric of America was being torn apart by a hysterical patriotic fervor that made enemies of anyone that didn’t agree with the rationale of destroying Vietnam in order to save it. “America, Love It Or Leave It,” spoke volumes as to the failure of a reasoned pro-war argument. Patriotism has perhaps never been so blind as during that completely futile expenditure of American military personnel. Our similar failures in Iraq and Afghanistan remain the ongoing ripples from that dark precedent of never walking away from a fight that cannot be won because of making an unbending policy stand in the wrong place against alien adversaries inherently more invested in the outcome.

By whatever circumstance they served, whether willing to make the ultimate sacrifice or just the unfortunate victim of being sent into harm’s way, on Memorial Day all those who died in American wars are remembered. It’s a national holiday born from a tradition of laying flowers on the graves of those taken in battle between the North and South during our own civil war. It’s a heroic attempt in remembrance, in that the U.S. has been at war almost perpetually since its violent birth by armed revolution. On Memorial Day it is the loss of life that is meant to be remembered. No part of it should be a celebration of that loss.

On that special day of remembrance I think foremost of the countless names of the fallen etched into the two 246 foot strikingly austere black walls set below ground on our National Mall, graphically enumerating those American combat personnel killed during Vietnam’s wholly domestic conflict. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, described by its architect as symbolizing a “wound that is closed and healing,” continues its powerful testament to the futility of thinking that military might alone can achieve victory or that brutal subjugation can win over hearts and minds. Last year I finally had opportunity to visit it, and found myself profoundly moved. Its haunting representation of such an overwhelmingly pointless loss left me numbed and enraged at the same time. So many lives sacrificed because of a perceived threat imagined so important at the time, and yet that domino remains communist to this day as a now valued trading partner and vacation destination to many Americans, even those who first visited there with a M16 in hand.

Ultimately, I put on a uniform not to defend my country but so as to never have to defend my personal patriotism in challenging those so fiercely gung-ho as long as they themselves never have to suit up.

Memorial day remembers those who paid the ultimate price. That price should never, ever be paid due to a cavalier use of armed force in order to satisfy the willfulness of those that have never spent one day in uniform. All the patriotic flag-waving in the world will never bring back the dead.

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.