Military history has always fascinated me. 

When I was young, nothing could surpass trips to see my grandfather, first in North Carolina and then Indiana, where I would sit in his study, and we would pour over old maps and books on the Civil War. 

Once, when he was in Winstom Salem, North Carolina, he took me to the Guilford Courthouse battlefield park, the site of a Revolutionary War battle in 1781 that epitomized much of how the war was fought. While the larger but less experienced Americans under Nathanael Greene lost the battle, they inflicted such heavy casualties on the British that the commander, Lord Cornwallis, was forced to march to the coast for resupply. He chose the port of Yorktown, and the rest is history. 

My grandfather, my papa, could bring to life so much history and as a youth I lapped it up. The only era of military history we rarely touched on was his own. He served as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, drafted during the Korean War just after he had finished his bachelor’s degree in biology and appeared headed for a career in research. 

Of his time overseas, and even exactly where he was, he never said, only that he trained soldiers on heavy weapons and injured his back in a fall. 

What I only learned later, after his passing, is that his mother had told my father that my papa, when he returned from his time in the service, burned all of his Army clothes in a bonfire on the family ranch near Douglas. 

I still don’t know what he saw, what happened, but it stays with me as a reminder of how war, behind the grand strategy and heroic soldiers and brilliant leaders, leaves behind pain, anger and other emotions I don’t truly understand as someone who hasn’t served. 

And I know veterans react differently to surviving and returning to civilian life. My father-in-law, an Army infantryman who was badly wounded in combat during the Tet Offensive in 1968 in Vietnam, talked often in his final months before his passing about his time in Vietnam, both the funny moments and the tough ones. 

He also mentioned soldiers and commanders he knew who never returned, and I wonder who my papa was thinking about when he burned his Army gear at the ranch, if there were soldiers he had known who didn’t return from Korea. 

I’m writing this editorial ahead of Memorial Day as we are printing the paper early to give staff the day off, this being the Tuesday paper many of you will be reading a day following that day of remembrance. Still, I hope you took time to remember all those who, as President Lincoln so eloquently put it in the Gettysburg Address, while standing on hallowed ground where more than 7,000 soldiers were killed, gave their “last full measure of devotion” to our country. 

More importantly, I hope we all remember more often than just one day a year those soldiers, sailors and airmen we’ve lost, not just in combat but to accidents, suicides, lingering problems and more.

After all, the success of Guilford Courthouse for the Americans was that it led to the death or wounding of many British soldiers and American loyalists, who were fighting, as those in Greene’s army, for something they believed in, and it came at the cost of many lives on both sides. 

As British poet Lauren Binyon wrote in 1914 in “For the Fallen,” a poem written after seeing the early carnage of World War I: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” He also writes, “At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.”