Tom Engelhardt: How Memorial Day Glosses Over the Real Horrors of War

It's the saddest reading around: The little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two, those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: Rank, name, age, small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin, means of death"small arms fire," "improvised explosive device," "the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform," or sometimes vaguer like "while conducting combat operations," "supporting Operation Enduring Freedom," or simply no explanation at all, and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: "The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom." Sometimes they include more than one death. They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves. Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America's still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I've read them obsessively for years. May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend, when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan. It's a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways. Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won't have thought about the "memorial" in Memorial Day at all, especially now that it's largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts!