I don't do abstract really well on Memorial Day, or Veterans' Day, or any other day when I remember the brothers and sisters who put boots on the ground wherever they are sent. Part of the reason I feel so passionately about the need to examine, criticize, and debate American military policy, and part of the reason that I have become increasingly non-interventionist in my foreign policy views is that the lives of these American citizens are important. Even those who never actually fired a shot in anger, but spent the long years training, the long nights awake and shivering, doing the things that needed to be done that nobody else wanted to do.... On Memorial Day I will remember three soldiers from the Virginia Army National Guard who are no longer with us. One reader stopping by here will recognize at least two of the names; to pretty much everybody else they will remain just that ... names without stories attached. I could tell the stories. I could make my evocation of the...

Unfortunately, politics doesn't get suspended on Memorial Day, but that is what it is. Here's what Memorial Day means to me, as an American citizen and as a former Medic in the US Army: the story of PFC Desmond Doss at Okinawa. Doss pass away two years ago; this is taken from his extended obituary on the Adventist News Network : Desmond T. Doss, Sr., who braved ridicule to serve in World War II as a U.S. Army medic without carrying a gun, and who labored on a Sabbath, May 5, 1945, to rescue 75 wounded soldiers pinned down by enemy gunfire on the island of Okinawa, died March 23 at his residence in Piedmont, Alabama. Doss, the only conscientious objector to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II, was 87 years of age. Desmond T. Doss, Sr., who braved ridicule to serve in World War II as a U.S. Army medic without carrying a gun, and who labored on a Sabbath, May 5, 1945, to rescue 75 wounded soldiers pinned down by enemy gunfire on the island of Okinawa, di...