This is the second in a new series of monthly comments by the editor of COMMENTARY on a wide range of topical matters. The opinions Mr. Podhoretz expresses here are his own, and are not to be taken as statements of editorial policy.

Despite the invasion of Cambodia, the end of the Vietnam war is clearly in sight, for us at least if not for the Vietnamese themselves. By the time we leave, more than forty thousand Americans will have been killed in a war for which even the President of their country now refuses to make any noble or transcendent claim. Does this mean that they will have died in vain? It is a hideous question to which no adequate answer can be given in terms ordinarily considered political. In thinking about such a question, if one is thinking seriously, one’s mind inevitably turns to first things and to last things, precisely those things that politics no longer even pretends to care about in the slightest. My own mind, on this Memorial Day of 1970, has been much taken up with first things and last things, but about these I will not here presume to write. Let me instead tell a story.

A few years ago I accompanied my friend Willie Morris, the editor of Harper’s, on a trip to Mississippi which, as all the world must surely know by now, is his native state. Like every Southerner I have ever met, Willie Morris is mildly obsessed with the Civil War, and it was therefore unthinkable that a trip to Mississippi should pass without a visit to Vicksburg, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of that bloodiest of American wars. Some 22,000 men, Yankees and Confederates both, were killed at Vicksburg; their average age was about nineteen. As Willie and I wandered together up and down the interminable rows of gravestones reading the names and the regiments of all those fallen children of a hundred years ago, I was suddenly invaded by a phrase from the Gettysburg Address which, at Willie’s insistence, I had only minutes earlier read aloud from a plaque posted at the entrance to the cemetery: that these dead shall not have died in vain. “What do you really think, Willie,” I said, “did they die in vain or not?” For a long moment he stared down at a gravestone, but instead of answering he led me over to where his grandmother, who had come along with us on the drive from Yazoo City, was sitting. She was a very old lady, born just a few years after the Civil War and still possessed of a living sense of connection with it. “Mamie,” he said, “tell us. Did all those dead boys buried here die in vain or not? What do you think, Mamie?” The old woman, nearly blind but otherwise entirely alert, shook her head slowly, squinting sightlessly in the direction of his voice. “I don’t know, son,” she said, “I don’t know.” And then, pausing to consider, she added in a tone that simultaneously chilled the blood and warmed the heart, “I reckon they all would have been dead and buried by now anyway.”

That astonishing remark—which says, among all the other things it says, that to die young in a war is one of the possible ways for mortal beings to die, and not necessarily the worst—has been much on my mind today, Memorial Day of 1970, as the wanton American involvement in Vietnam comes closer and closer to an end.

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