Tallying our war dead
* 4,435 died in the Revolutionary War* 2,260 died in the War of 1812* 13,283 died in the Mexican War* 364,511 died in the Civil War* 2,446 died in the Spanish-American War* 116,516 died in World War I* 405,399 died in World War II* 36,574 died in the Korean War* 58,220 died in the Vietnam War* 1,948* died in the Persian Gulf War* 2,352* died in Operation Enduring Freedom* 4,412* died in Operation Iraqi Freedom* 66* died in Operation New Dawn* As of Dec. 22, 2014Source: Congressional Research Service
Today -- Memorial Day -- is the day we honor those who died in our wars.
In many ways, Memorial Day and the honor we give our fallen soldiers seem to be the only honorable things about war.
War is, after all, the end result of our inabilities to live peacefully and fairly with each other.
The poet Archibald MacLeish put it well in "The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak:"
"They say, Our deaths are not ours: they are yours," MacLeish writes for the silent dead.
At Chattanooga National Cemetery, the death lines up row after row and knee-deep across gentle hillsides of 50,000 tombstones. Not all there died in battles, but all carried to their eventual deaths the scars -- mental and physical -- of wars stretching across two and a half centuries.
The cemetery -- adorned this Memorial Day with tens of thousands of small flags planted by Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts -- got its start in 1863 when the Union dead were buried there following the battles of Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Orchard Knob, Lookout Mountain and other Civil War skirmishes in the area.
Within two years, more than 12,000 Union soldiers -- about 5,000 unknown -- rested there. In 1867, the cemetery was given official government designation.
One Revolutionary War veteran is buried there, as are those who served in the nation's other wars and in peacetime.
Until a few years ago, the cemetery was expected to close for new burials this year, but an expansion project made room for more war and more than 5,000 future interments.
We elevate our fallen soldiers' sacrifices by saying they helped safeguard our freedoms.
But we owe it to them to safeguard peace as well.