Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, a Quinnipiac poll asked U.S. adults what they would do if they were facing the same level of crisis as the Ukrainians. Would they remain in the United States and fight or would they leave? A majority (52%) of Democrats said they would leave, whereas majorities of Republicans (68%) and independents (57%) said they would stay and fight.
On Memorial Day, we remember those men and women who didn’t leave when America was attacked, and indeed gave “the last full measure of their devotion.”
About 1.2 million American soldiers have fallen in battle or out of theater during wartime. Memorial Day 2020, I wrote in these pages about the unusual way America has historically accounted for these soldier dead. Across the globe, the U.S. government continues to search for and recover their remains. Our debt to the fallen and their families never ends, because they stayed.
(Which is more than can be said of the police who this week ran away from not toward the sound of gunfire at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.)
In fairness, the results of the Quinnipiac poll may be more nuanced — for example, in another hypothetical, Democrats were more supportive (88%) of a military response if Russia expands the war and attacks a NATO member than Republicans or independents — but still it gets at a truth, I think.
Too many Democrats undervalue the importance of staying and fighting for their causes. It’s not enough to be right on the issues. We must also win elections, or in Utah at least contend in a way that moderates a run-away Republican Party. This requires grass roots organization, which Utah Democrats woefully lack. After convention delegates threw their support to Evan McMullin’s independent campaign for senator — a move I supported — the Tribune Editorial Board rightly pegged a weak ground game on the part of Democrats as the underlying cause.
Democracy is not something that is done. It is something that is being done. It’s fragile, and must be the project of every generation. Ignored, it naturally decays to autocracy. Voter turnout increased in every U.S. state during the 2020 general election and, because of that democratic achievement, Donald Trump was duly fired from the presidency. But the cooperation and commitment behind it had a vanishingly short half-life.
Nor are constitutional rights, once recognized, forever guaranteed. They can be — and in American history, have been — stripped away. If — as is likely — a bare 5-4 majority of Supreme Court justices overturns Roe v. Wade, then other women’s reproductive rights could also fall in the next few years. To stop this retreat or restore rights, Democrats will have to organize, from the bottom up, for years, even decades.
Memorial Day is an opportunity to assess our covenant with those U.S. soldiers who stayed and fought, and died. “The living,” Osman White wrote after World War II, “have the cause of the dead in trust.” Otherwise, their sacrifices would be in vain.
Overall, their cause was freedom, here and around the world. Right now, we’re furthering the cause in Ukraine, but slowly strangling it at home.
Most soldier dead are buried in cemeteries in the United States. But more than 140,000 are also interred in 26 cemeteries in 10 foreign countries.
The solicitude accorded our fallen after the end of the Second World War was seen on the day 30,000 Belgians lined the Antwerp docks to pay their respects as the first of 21 so-called ghost ships steamed down the Scheldt carrying the caskets of 5,000 of our soldier dead destined for home. They pledged to look after the 61,000 Americans who would remain interred in cemeteries in France and other allied countries, “as if,” one man vowed, “their tombs were our children’s.”
And so they have. On Memorial Day, 1945, only weeks after liberation, the Dutch gathered 20 truck loads of flower petals from 60 villages and spread them like a wondrous quilt covering 17,000 temporary U.S. military graves located in a new cemetery carved from farmland near the village of Margraten.
Knowing the American families of the fallen would not be able to visit the cemetery on a regular basis, local residents began adopting the permanent graves. They research the lives of the service members using a database set up for that purpose, correspond with the surviving family members and regularly place flowers on the graves. To this day, there is a waiting list to adopt the graves of the U.S. soldiers buried there.
“People around here still consider it an honor to remember the fallen and missing U.S. soldiers,” said Bart van Der Sterren, who has adopted the graves of two Americans, including PFC Hans Bergmayr of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “For us, it is the least we can do to show our gratitude and respect for what so many young men from far over the ocean did for us more than 75 years ago.”
Amen.
David Burns
David Burns is a former U.S. Navy officer. He lives in Salt Lake City.