I was invited to join host Christopher Lydon on his podcast Radio Open Source for a special Memorial Day episode, along with several other veterans who’ve contributed essays to a new book called Paths of Dissent, due out later this summer. Listen below or wherever you get your pods!
“Memorial Day can feel different every year, bittersweet at its best. It’s been the last Monday in May since 1868, first as Decoration Day, for marking the graves of our Civil War dead—lest Americans forget, it was said, those who had paid the price of a free and undivided republic. Again this year it is a somber day of reflection: 22 years into a young century of extravagant losses, and troubling numbers. The first shock is not that so many have died but that so few have served: one percent of the population in our US fighting forces through the “forever wars” since 9/11. Then, how do we explain that among American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, suicide has taken many more lives than combat did?” – Radio Open Source