"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." — William Tecumseh Sherman 

What a waste.

I see the political cartoons.  I hear the speeches.  I watch the parades and the flag waving.  The drone of the television news anchors.  But it is not about the sacrifice of everything a person ever would have that is being memorialized.  The memorial is a affirmation of the very system that used up the lives of the soldier in the first place.  The one's responsible for sending death to far away shores and distant canyons.  Not in the name of freedom, liberty or self defense.  In the name of conquest.

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty...then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."  -- Plato

So to all the parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, and children of the dead.  Don't be proud of the life your relations gave dying in some foreign land.  Or leaving behind their limbs or senses.  They were wasted for nothing more noble than the profit of the military industrial complex.  For most they volunteered.  For others, they were enslaved to do their masters bidding.

"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."  -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

When the Mexicans or the Canadians invade with arms then the soldier's sacrifice will be in defense of property and lives.  Anything else is theft organized by the gang with a flag for their profit at the dead's expense.  Fair bargain as far as your elected officials are concerned.  And they'll throw a parade or two in honor of youthful   myopic foolishness.  And plant some flags.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."  -- H.L. Mencken

But don't take my word for it.  Hear from a two time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, the most highly decorated Marine, who retired a Major General and created the permanent Marine Corps Camp at Quantico.

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny." -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."  -- James Madison

"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity."  -- The Bayou, Baton Rouge, LA

"I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none..."  -- Thomas Jefferson