The freshest graves, the most recent casualties, often have the most flowers, and they usually sustain the most forcible grief. The oldest graves of the war dead in this nation’s history are now very old, and many of them lie forgotten, as forgotten as some of the wars they fought in. What those deaths accomplished is written into the fabric of this country, no matter how purposeful or purposeless they may have seemed at the time.

Military training teaches a small, powerful coherence — the devotion of soldiers to their unit. One of the shocks many grieving families must deal with is the sudden knowledge that this military coherence was stronger than anything the family itself could offer. Soldiers fighting in the large causes tend to die for the small causes — for a sense of duty to one another, the building block upon which armies are built.

Every family that has lost a son or daughter in battle has had to decide whether the large justifications of war actually justify that final, particular sacrifice. Many Americans are tempted to let the valuation of those deaths rest solely with the families themselves. We ease the thought of those deaths with the words that have always seemed most persuasive over the grave. We ease the memory of them by folding them into the fabric of history, as if the task of saying what those deaths really meant lay beyond us.

But we who are alive — kin or no kin — also have a right to ask why these soldiers died, not just now, in this present war, but throughout the course of our history. The language of those larger causes — words like America, freedom, liberty, patriotism — are used in our names as well.