War changed my life, before I was ever born.

I am, of course, not alone in this – tens millions of people across the planet are caught up in wars not of their making, not of their choosing, not of their fighting. We are bystanders to it all, and yet our lives are forever altered.

And we are the forgotten witnesses to what war really means.

The impact of war goes well beyond chickenhawk politicians braying for war – and the money and attention and votes it brings to them. It goes beyond a entrenched military industrial complex that funnels billions of dollars to a few big corporations. It goes beyond even the flag-covered coffins of soldiers returned home, photos of which were banned from being shown for many years and which still tend to be hidden from view.

Today is Memorial Day.

It’s the day set aside to remember the soldiers who died serving in the military. It gives everyone an opportunity to take a moment to give a much-deserved thank you and remembrance of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who have died in service to their country. This is indeed the best way to commemorate the day.

(Don’t save your thanks to vets for just Veteran’s Day either. Give to the USO, and other organizations, and show tangible thanks and support!)

But this day also makes me furious. All I see is the enormous waste – of life, of potential, of money, of every possibility that could have happened and didn’t. Because someone, somewhere – maybe with great information and with the best of intentions, but probably not (I’ve read too much history to not be cynical on this) – decided it was okay to ruin lives.

Dead is easy. Dead is done. Everyone has their own thoughts on death; but in this context – it’s over. 58,202 American soldiers died in Vietnam. Their stories, their possibilities, the good things they could have contributed to society – it’s over. Their families and friends are allowed to mourn them, and try to get on with their lives as well as they can. We will never replace the empty spots they should have been there to fill. The contributions are gone forever.

But most people in wars don’t die. They go on. And their war follows them forever. And it connects to everyone around them. And it never lets go. And life for everyone around them is changed forever.

My dad was like a lot of rural kids growing up on a farm: a lot of hard work, no extra money, not a lot of opportunity floating around for anyone. And my grandmother was like a lot of immigrant moms: she wanted better things for her son. She wanted him to go to college, to get an education, and to have a good life. So she helped to push him there, and he was able to go to college. It took money that nobody had; so he sold his cows, he worked assorted jobs, and he joined ROTC. He graduated, got married to my mom, and four months later went to war in Vietnam.

He came home with a lot of medals for all kinds of things, and with scars physical and mental. He doesn’t talk a lot about it. When we were kids, he would tell us about how much he liked chocolate chip cookies in MREs, and would trade hand grenades for them. It was just enough information to let us know things were scary, but not so much that we would be too scared. We saw pictures of him standing at an orphanage, with kids swimming in a bomb crater filled with water. He told us about forging signatures (Donald Duck, I believe) to get supplies there. He showed us pictures of four of his South Vietnamese colleagues visiting us in Colorado in 1969. They got to hold his baby (me!), and they got to have the unusual experience of snowball fights high in the Rocky Mountains. When we asked what happened next, he just briefly said “They are probably all dead,” and changed the subject.