Memorial Day remembrance tends to cluster. In public memory and in public observance, it gravitates to certain conflicts and generations: World War II, Vietnam and, more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. The ceremonies, the tributes, the coverage and the cultural weight of the day concentrate there. That is understandable. Those wars produced the largest losses, the longest national arguments and the deepest generational marks.
But the 1.1 million Americans who have died in military service across this country’s history did not all die in those wars, and Memorial Day belongs to all of them — including the ones whose conflicts never had a name most people could remember and whose homecomings, if they came home at all, happened in near silence.
These are some of those conflicts and some of those people.
Korea: The War That Got Squeezed
The Korean War lasted three years, from June 1950 to July 1953. More than 5.8 million Americans served, 36,574 Americans died, and more than 103,000 were wounded. The conflict ended not with a peace treaty but with an armistice — a ceasefire agreement that technically remains in effect today, meaning the Korean War has never formally ended.
It is called “the forgotten war” because it followed World War II, one of the most thoroughly documented and culturally processed conflicts in American history; and preceded Vietnam, which consumed the national conversation for a generation. Korea fit between them: too soon after one to command its own gravity, too early before the other to benefit from the antiwar movement’s insistence on reckoning with American military losses.
Korean War veteran Earl Hummell captured it plainly in an interview years after the war. “When we came home, nobody knew where we were,” Hummell said. “They call it a forgotten war, but it wasn’t forgotten to me. It was real.”
The Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, dedicated in 1995, features 19 stainless steel soldier figures moving through a field of juniper bushes in triangular formation. In 2022, a Wall of Remembrance was added, etching the names of more than 36,000 Americans and 7,100 members of the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army in granite. It took nearly 70 years for those names to have a permanent home.
Beirut: 241 Dead on a Sunday Morning
A truck bomb drove into the U.S. Marine Corps barracks at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon on Oct. 23, 1983. The driver detonated the vehicle at 6:22 a.m. The explosion collapsed the four-story concrete building, killing 241 American service members: 220 Marines, 18 Navy sailors, and 3 Army soldiers. It remains the deadliest single-day death toll for Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.
The United States had deployed Marines to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force during the Lebanese Civil War. The political circumstances were complicated and contested. The human reality was not: 241 Americans went to sleep on a Saturday night and did not wake up.
No national memorial serves as a reminder of the Beirut bombing. The Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial in Marseilles, Illinois, displays more than 8,000 names etched in polished granite panels representing Americans lost in operations including Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti and attacks against U.S. forces worldwide. For most of those conflicts, that wall is as close to a dedicated national memorial as exists.
Grenada and Panama: Small Wars, Real Deaths
Operation Urgent Fury, the United States invasion of Grenada in October 1983, lasted eight days. The stated purpose was to protect American medical students and counter a Marxist coup that had resulted in the arrest and execution of Grenada’s prime minister. Nineteen Americans died in the operation. More than 100 were wounded.
Operation Just Cause, the United States invasion of Panama in December 1989, aimed to remove Manuel Noriega from power. Twenty-three Americans died, and 325 were wounded. The operation lasted weeks, but Noriega’s capture took nearly two weeks more.
Both operations are remembered, if at all, as footnotes — successful military operations that achieved their objectives, produced modest casualty numbers by historical standards, and returned to the background of American memory quickly. For the families of the 19 who died in Grenada and the 23 who died in Panama, Memorial Day is not a footnote.
Somalia: A Mission That Changed How America Goes to War
Operation Restore Hope and the subsequent Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia between 1992 and 1994 are remembered primarily through a single event: the Battle of Mogadishu on Oct. 3 and 4, 1993, in which 18 American soldiers died and 73 were wounded during an operation to capture lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
The battle, dramatized in the book and film “Black Hawk Down,” had consequences that reached far beyond Somalia. The images of American soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu shaped U.S. foreign policy for a decade and directly influenced the decision not to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, in which an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people were killed in 100 days.
Eighteen soldiers died in Mogadishu. The ripple effects of those 18 deaths reached across a continent.
The Conflicts Between the WarsBetween the major named conflicts, American service members have died in operations that most Americans could not name. The Iranian Hostage Rescue Mission in 1980 cost eight lives when aircraft collided in the Iranian desert during a failed attempt to rescue 52 American embassy hostages. Iraqi missiles struck the USS Stark in 1987, killing 37 sailors during a period when the United States was providing naval escorts in the Persian Gulf. The USS Cole bombing in 2000 killed 17 sailors in the port of Aden, Yemen.
American Lives Lost in Less Remembered Conflicts
- Korean War, 1950–1953: 36,574 killed in action; 103,284 wounded
- Beirut Barracks Bombing, 1983: 241 killed (220 Marines, 18 Navy, 3 Army)
- Operation Urgent Fury, Grenada, 1983: 19 killed, 116 wounded
- Operation Just Cause, Panama, 1989: 23 killed, 325 wounded
- Operation Restore Hope, Somalia, 1992–1993: 43 killed, including 18 in the Battle of Mogadishu
- Iranian Hostage Rescue Mission, 8 killed in aircraft collision
- USS Stark, 1987: 37 sailors killed by Iraqi missile strike
- Persian Gulf War, 1990–1991: 258 killed in action, 849 wounded
- USS Cole, 2000: 17 sailors killed in terrorist bombing, Aden, Yemen
- Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan, 2001–2021: 2,461 killed
- Operation Iraqi Freedom / New Dawn, 2003–201: 4,431 killed
What Memorial Day Is For
The tendency to cluster remembrance around the largest or most recent conflicts is human and understandable. It is also incomplete. Memorial Day was established specifically to resist that tendency: to insist that every grave gets a flag, that every name deserves the same acknowledgment regardless of whether the conflict they died in made the front page or the history books.
At Arlington this week, flags were placed at more than 260,000 graves. The soldiers placing them did not sort by conflict or by fame. They moved section by section, boot length by boot length, through all of it: the World War II dead and the Korean dead and the Vietnam dead and the ones who died in Beirut on a Sunday morning and the ones who died in a desert in Iran during a rescue mission that failed and the ones whose names most Americans could not attach to a war if asked.
All of them get a flag. That is the point.
Read More: ‘Old Guard’ Soldiers Place 260,000 Flags at Arlington for Memorial Day
Read the full article here