Editorial: Memorial Day, 2018

As Americans mark a day to remember those who gave their last full measure of devotion for their country, it's important to remember that we are, even now, a nation at war, still adding names to the honor rolls of the dead.

As we are enjoying a long weekend, firing up the barbecues, taking the first dip of summer, shopping a Memorial Day sale, we might be lulled into imagining that this is what peace looks like.

We should not.

The numbers may not be large enough to alarm us unless we are personally touched by them. But they are real: 13 American deaths so far this year in what we have called Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. And 32 last year, another 32 the year before that. In all, 7,955 American lives have been lost over the last 18 years that America has been at war.

It is the longest war America has ever waged — and just two years short of how a generation is defined. After almost a generation of war, then, we run the risk of accepting, or mistaking, this constant state of war as a constant state of peace.

We must not.

If we are to recognize the sacrifices of our dead, we must also take to heart the lesson they leave us — that war is neither to be normalized nor trivialized. Tolerable as it may seem to be engaged in conflict at this moment, we must seek to end it, and do all we can not to repeat it.

We must also heed another lesson that is all too apparent right now, as talks with a newly nuclear-armed North Korea collapse before they even begin, and as we have no idea whether a confrontation is brewing with Iran following President Donald Trump's decision to end America's participation in a deal to keep that nation from pursuing nuclear weapons development. The lesson is this: Without a corps of well-seasoned diplomats, even a superpower such as ours will find itself vulnerable and adrift in foreign relations.

Yet over the last two years, the State Department has been decimated, with funding cuts, firings, resignations and retirements leaving major gaps in our government's institutional knowledge of the world. As Defense Secretary James Mattis has said repeatedly, "If you don't fully fund diplomacy, I need to buy more ammunition."

It's a pithy and useful quote, but Memorial Day compels us to remember that the casualties of war are not ammunition, but human lives. At a time when war has gone on so long that it has become almost white noise in our political discourse, it is all too easy to forget the human cost.

On this Memorial Day, we dare not.