Deserving of our honor on Memorial Day: yes, but...

Fine men, and the military has an important job, but... most of these didn't die actually defending us. "War is a racket" as retired Marine Gen. Smedley Butler wrote. About the only cause I can sympathize with in these 20th-early 21st-century wars is the one to fight global Communism, and global Communism was partly our own fault (World War II in a nutshell: the USSR won, we were dumb enough to help them, and broke Britain handed us their empire; the Nazis and imperial Japan weren't our problems). Even there, Vietnam was a liberal interventionist crusade; the authentic American right, such as the John Birch Society, was split on it. (The JBS now talks sense about Russia and the Ukraine: those countries are not Communist; stay out of it.) Nobody remembers that a Democrat got us in and a Republican got us out of both Korea and Vietnam. (Still, better the working-class ethnic and black young men who tried to do what their country asked than the partying rich kids cheering for the other side and worse.) World War I was an immoral European quagmire nothing to do with us, and Iraq and Afghanistan simply were and are nonsensical. Anyway, may our war dead rest in peace.