Dying well in war

How to honor our war dead, and pray for permanent peace

I’m going to start my Memorial Day essay with the law and the lyrics. America was born in war. Our oldest institutions are for making war. Our heroes are war heroes. On Memorial Day, we honor those who have died in battle, in war. It is well we should. But we should also look at what it is to die well in war, for to sing Edwin Starr’s 1970 lyrics, is only a broken platitude for those who have lost their lives.

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, uhh

Andersonville National Cemetery, Andersonville, Georgia. EliseofFlorida, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Is war good for absolutely nothing? I say not by a longshot. More have died by oppression, starvation, natural disaster, disease, and plain murder than as a soldier in war. War to stop tyranny and the expansion of evil regimes by conquest is worthy of fighting, and dying well. But that’s not really a reason for any individual to fight.

Any force, even a smaller force, can conquer another nation if the individuals and groups within the larger foe won’t fight, by using the divide and conquer strategy. To lose this way is to suffer defeat in detail, which is a military term of being divided and sequentially conquered. To die in a war that should be won, for the best and most noble causes, even for family, or patriotism, or heritage, or religion, is easy to stamp with the mark of futility; not dying well.

It is not the overarching cause of a war that makes a dead soldier die well. There are many Germans who fought in World War II, or Japanese Imperial troops, or Confederate Johnny Rebs, or Egyptians in Israel in 1973, or Russians in Ukraine today, of whom their compatriots and fellow soldiers would say “he died well.” Perhaps they sacrificially fell on a grenade, or warned their squad, giving them seconds needed to escape certain death, or put themselves in mortal peril for their friends. This is why medals are awarded, even by aggressor nations whose battle is, to our eyes, in support of things objectively evil.

Gen. George S. Patton repeatedly gave a speech to his Third Army troops, one he had practiced well. On May 31, 1944, he added one line, opening with:

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Patton was all about winning, not dying. He knew some of his men would die in battle. He was more concerned that they would die well, at least by his standards.

On Memorial Day, do we honor only our troops who died well by Patton’s rule, or do we honor all who “here gave the last full measure of devotion,” as President Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address in 1864?

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Is it for the soldiers to decide who died not in vain, and who did? Is it for us who are living? Is it for the victors to decide, and the vanquished to lament the futility of their war dead? Did Lincoln mean that if the United States did not continue to supply young men to die in war, that might allow us to be defeated in detail, that all who died did so in vain? Would they have not died well?

It’s not an easy question, but there is a viewpoint, I think, that helps me answer it. Wars between groups begin and end, or heat up and then cool off, are deadly and then pause in fervency and death. But war as a human condition does not really stop, at least not by any time scale we can measure and declare at an end.

Here’s a tidbit about how the United States honors war dead by our law.

By American law, Memorial Day is not mandatory. Congress does not require the President to honor it. In 36 U.S. Code § 116, Congress merely requests the President “to issue each year a proclamation—

(1) calling on the people of the United States to observe Memorial Day by praying, according to their individual religious faith, for permanent peace;

(2) designating a period of time on Memorial Day during which the people may unite in prayer for a permanent peace;

(3) calling on the people of the United States to unite in prayer at that time; and

(4) calling on the media to join in observing Memorial Day and the period of prayer.

In accordance with that request, this year, 2025, as in all other years since the law was enacted on May 11, 1950, President Donald Trump has issued the proclamation. It is a sad but salient bit of history that just 45 days after Congress approved that joint resolution designating the last Monday in May as a day of prayer for peace, 70,000 North Korean soldiers stormed across the border into South Korea, igniting a war that claimed at least three million civilians and continues to this day.

War is with us and is the natural state of mankind. We live under the threat of it and many die in its violence. Many more die in its aftermath, and all of creation suffers the destruction we have wrought. To die in war is no different to the dying than any other way—the war is over for the dead. But war is never over until the one who created all brings it to a close.

War does not belong to us. Neither does death, or the earth, or anything in it, or our own souls.

Americans are called upon by Congress and by presidential proclamation to pray for permanent peace. To whom shall we address the prayer, and what shall we entreat of Him?

Moses told the people of Israel to pray to the Lord in Exodus 9:28-30.

Pray to the Lord, for we have had enough thunder and hail. I will let you go; you don’t have to stay any longer.”

Moses replied, “When I have gone out of the city, I will spread out my hands in prayer to the Lord. The thunder will stop and there will be no more hail, so you may know that the earth is the Lord’s. But I know that you and your officials still do not fear the Lord God.”

We pray to the Lord because by that we may know the earth is the Lord’s. King David declared in Psalm 24:1-3:

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it;
for he founded it on the seas
and established it on the waters.

All of us who pray for permanent peace, in a world filled with permanent war, can know that the earth, and we, are His. He hears our prayers. To move to a world where permanent peace rules, we must move past the current world of war, the one waged by the enemy of our souls, the accuser, who will at the end of the age be bound and cast into a pit for a thousand years. And then there will be an end to war, permanently.

Job was one of the most tragic characters in the Bible. The Lord gave Satan permission to take everything Job had, to ruin him. The only thing God prohibited Satan from taking was Job’s life. But Job didn’t know this.

In her grief, Job’s wife asked him, “Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!” Job responded: “You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” But Job did question God, to His face, and to his friends, he quieted them.

Job 13:13-19

“Keep silent and let me speak;
then let come to me what may.
Why do I put myself in jeopardy
and take my life in my hands?
Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him;
I will surely defend my ways to his face.
Indeed, this will turn out for my deliverance,
for no godless person would dare come before him!
Listen carefully to what I say;
let my words ring in your ears.
Now that I have prepared my case,
I know I will be vindicated.
Can anyone bring charges against me?
If so, I will be silent and die.

Job knew his life belonged to God, and to God he was accountable for dying well. To die well is to know who holds death itself. Job knew who was his redeemer, and that his redeemer lives.

Job 19:23-27

“Oh, that my words were recorded,
that they were written on a scroll,
that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead,
or engraved in rock forever!
I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!

There are few more prophetic verses in the Law and the Prophets—and Job is said to be one of the most ancient texts in that canon—that speak of the end times, and the coming of the Lord, of the Son of God, in his glory and power, to set right the earth.

Isaiah, one of the most prolific of the Hebrew prophets, wrote of the time when the Lord will return in Isaiah 24. It begins ominously. Isaiah 24 verses 1 and 3:

See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth
and devastate it;
he will ruin its face
and scatter its inhabitants—
…
The earth will be completely laid waste
and totally plundered.
The Lord has spoken this word.

In chapter 25, Isaiah writes of how the “Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth.”

There is a time coming, whether I am alive or dead on this earth, when the Lord will return and do this. Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18:

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Paul did not get this from his own mind, or from an angel who told him. He got it from reading Isaiah, and Job, and Daniel, and the five Books of Moses.

When Congress encourages us to pray for permanent peace, I see it as not only honoring our own war dead, but also praying for the coming of the Lord. Without God, what is war good for? Absolutely nothing.

But those who die in Christ inherit His righteousness. In Him we honor our Memorial Day fallen, and in Him their redeemer lives and will walk upon the earth. This is how I pray, and I believe all who pray this way will hear from heaven, and receive the peace beyond understanding in the midst of this time of war and violence.

Have a blessed Memorial Day.