By John Byrnes, Strategic Director at Concerned Veterans for America
Memorial Day serves a special and sacred purpose in American civil life. We remember our fallen, while celebrating our nation and the values they died for. We should also remember to honor those who made it home before making their ultimate sacrifice. Our Memorial Day observances should be a reflection, examining duty, sacrifice, service, and purpose.
This holiday comes every year at the end of May and marks the beginning of summer in America. May is both Military Appreciation Month and Mental Health Awareness Month.
Throughout the Global War on Terror, I have felt the grief of losing comrades to enemy action. I’ve also known many who physically made it home but never truly returned mentally or emotionally. I have come to believe Memorial Day is about honoring the men and women who lost their lives in combat as well as those service members who took their own lives here at home.
Since 2005, when I returned home from a deployment to Iraq, I have seen the toll combat takes on mental well-being, on emotional and spiritual health. Every trip overseas to a conflict zone knocked me a little off kilter, emotionally, when I returned, and I’ve sought help for those emotional wounds.
Today there is a mental health epidemic raging in America’s veteran population. While over 7,000 service members died overseas in operations in and around Iraq and Afghanistan, over 30,000 post-9/11 war veterans have killed themselves.
The tragedy of veteran suicide has personally affected me as deeply as my comrades killed while deployed. It troubles me even more that among the four friends I mourn for their post-deployment suicides, two were incredibly competent officers, strong leaders who projected calm and confidence in the course of their duties.
Soldiers who are severely wounded in combat, taken off the battlefield alive and later succumb to those wounds, are considered to have ‘‘died of wounds.” So, we should mourn those who return home with mental injuries and turn to suicide when hope has faded as casualties of war. They deserve the honor of remembrance as well.
Memorial Day should remind us of the costs of war. It should drive our leaders to choose war carefully. America has fought just and necessary wars in our history. We have also fought unnecessary wars of choice.
Was it worth the price of nearly 40,000 Americans taken from us by the visible and invisible wounds of war for the United States to try, and then fail, to create democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq? I would argue that it was not.
It is unquestionable that the U.S. had to react militarily to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by destroying al-Qaeda’s leadership and ousting the Taliban from power. But the decades that followed led to needless loss and bloodshed.
Our war dead remind us of the need for introspection before committing to force.
Every life lost deserves remembrance, but we dishonor them when we aren’t honest about the way our leaders go to and conduct war. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines deserve a future, and the blood of our service members should only be spilled when doing so is the sole option to safeguard our freedom at home.
We as a nation owe the current and future generations of war fighters an honest assessment of when military action is proper and necessary, whether that is Europe, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or a future military conflict.
American service members who sacrificed themselves died to protect a nation that strives for better. A nation of ideals. A country that lives up to those ideals is one that must be honest with itself about its role in the world.
How do we best honor our dead? We should define clear national interests, around the security of our borders in North America, the security of our democratic system of governance, and the protection of our economic prosperity. In almost all cases we should prefer diplomacy. And we should be willing partners engaging to drive peace elsewhere, to avoid risking military entanglement.
This reflection, frankly, includes examining partnerships and alliances which should always serve these core U.S. interests. We should never allow partners to sleepwalk us into their wars, where Americans will die, unless it serves our needs as well as theirs.
In the Middle East we spent decades fighting ever-evolving enemies. In Asia and the Pacific our diverse partners and allies look first to America rather than their own resources, even in the face of China’s rise. In Europe our NATO allies are only slowly beginning to carry their own weight in continental security. In cases America must be clear that we will not risk more service members to be fondly recalled on a future Memorial Day, unless it truly benefits those who would hold their memories. Young American lives should not be carelessly spent.
John Byrnes is strategic director at Concerned Veterans for America and a combat veteran of the Marine Corps and National Guard.© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
