A few years ago, I spent Memorial Day in Italy, 76 years after my father was stationed there in the Second World War. Somehow it felt oddly right to be there as the world again staggers out of a global conflict, even if this time our enemy was a microscopic one fought with syringes instead of young soldiers.

I had finally gotten vaccinated, and really thought I’d want to celebrate. But as I walked the peaceful rows of the American Cemetery outside of Florence, I was instead remembering my father’s quiet story of how his war ended 76 years earlier.

In all the time in the War there was never a thought of it ending. We didn’t have access to newspapers or radios so we really did not know what was going on. The end was so casual. One of the guys was walking along and said that Germany surrendered…—Tech Sergeant Robert Figel, Radio Operator Gunner on the B-17 Flying Fortress Nobody’s Baby

The calm acres of the Florence American Cemetery contain the graves of over 4,400 young soldiers, and more than 1,400 more names on the Walls of the Missing.

Thanks. And despair.

This year, as we remember and honor the sacrifices of that generation and their world war, I also wonder if they would be sad to see so many fighting and dying today. I hope everyone will take a moment to reflect on the devastation of ongoing war even as we honor our warriors. 

For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives.—Pericles of Athens, (431 BCE) Oration for the Annual Public Funeral of the War Dead at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War