Today is Memorial Day. 

What can I say? Nothing that has not been said before.

It gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. People died for me. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, for good cause or in vain—they gave their lives.

This morning we will attend the Memorial Day Parade in Monona. Given just a little wedge of dry weather, we’ll cheer as our granddaughter marches down the street, playing her trombone in the high school band. We’ll applaud, full of pride and happiness—as we ought.

Our happiness came with a price tag. Later in the day, we’ll make time to remember the fallen. 

• My great-great-grandfather, Anders Gunstensen, who died of dysentery contracted at Vicksburg in 1863, as surely a victim of the war as if a bullet had found his heart.
• My uncles, Stanley and Franklin Sommers, shot from the sky at opposite ends of the earth—one over the Solomon Islands, the other over France. They were uncles I never knew, taken before I entered the world. 
• My friends Billy Harff and Bruce Hulting, among the many lost when America stumbled into a little-understood war in Southeast Asia.
• Ryan Jopek, a Wisconsin Guardmember who died in Iraq, before his twenty-first birthday. I photographed him with his father before he left Madison.

It’s personal.

War comes for each new generation, with the regularity of a clock striking twelve. 

The aggressor fails to resist the lure of power. The defender can hardly be blamed for choosing  survival.

The cost is obscene, but young men and women must pay it just the same. 

Let us weep for our lost brothers and sisters and honor their sacrifice.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

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