Don Feder, GrassTopsUSA.com

Speaking at the dedication of a cemetery at Gettysburg, just months after the climatic battle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln called on the Americans of his day to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

That’s the challenge Americans confront – not just on Memorial Day, but every day. Will all of the sacrifice, the suffering and the heroism be for naught?

But it’s good to have an occasion like Memorial Day to focus our attention – to think of the Americans who gave so much, in some cases everything, so that an ideal elegant in its simplicity (government of the people, by the people and for the people) would endure down through the ages.

On Sunday, I thought of the Continental soldiers, their feet wrapped in rags, who left bloody footprints in the snow during Washington’s retreat from New York in 1776. I thought of the privation suffered at Valley Forge, of the brave men who held Cemetery Ridge (and the brave men who charged up the ridge), of the endurance of the Lost Battalion of the Argonne, of the determination of the boys of the 2nd Ranger Battalion who scaled the heights of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day, of the Battling Bastards of Bastogne, of the Marines on Iwo Jima, of those who fought from San Juan Hill to Pork Chop Hill, from the Tet Offensive to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Memorial Day has its origins in the post-Civil war era, with the tradition of decorating the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers.

It grew into proclamations and parades – oratory, three-day weekends and sales, of old soldiers wearing faded uniforms once more to salute the Flag as it passes by, and remember their buddies sleeping under palm trees, in jungles and in burial grounds across Europe.

It always comes down to the graves – so many of them in the course of 236 years. Lincoln also spoke of the “mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land.”

This year, as they have on every Memorial Day since 1948, soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment placed flags on the more than 260,000 graves at Arlington National Cemetery.

They are a poignant reminder of the price paid for freedom – more than 8,000 combat deaths in the Revolutionary War, 2,260 in the War of 1812, 212,938 on both sides of the Civil War, 53,402 in World War I, 291,557 in World War II, 53,686 in Korea, 47,424 in Vietnam and 4,628, so far, in the War on Terror .

Besides those who gave their lives, the price was also paid in shattered lives – those who came home with missing limbs and those who bore psychological scars – who woke up screaming years later from nightmares relieved night after night….

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