Memorial Day 2026: Honoring the Fallen Honestly

It’s Memorial Day, and Americans are out barbecuing, having a few beers, and spending time with their loved ones, celebrating to honor the fallen warriors who died to protect our nation, our freedoms, and our way of life.

But I have a serious question that may make you uncomfortable: Did they really die to protect those things?

If you believe every war we have ever started, engaged in, or supported was just, your answer will be a resounding “Yes!” But more and more Americans are beginning to realize they’ve been lied to about many of these wars, especially those born out of the so-called “War on Terror.” Many of those Americans are war veterans like myself.

America is 250 years old this year yet has been at war for over 96% of its existence. Certainly some of these wars were just, but most of them, especially after 1913, have been nothing but special-interest wars that benefited the Military Industrial Complex at the expense of the American people. We were warned about this by people who worked from the inside: General Smedley Butler, who wrote a short book called War is a Racket, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his presidential farewell address. I highly recommend every American read both.

Did you know that despite all the fighting our nation has been and remains involved in, it has only formally declared war five times? The last formal declaration was in 1942 against the Axis Powers. Yet for over eight decades since, we have been engaged in “military-led operations,” “police actions,” and “humanitarian interventions”—sanitized terms used to avoid calling these things what they are: wars.

In 1949, the US government renamed the “Department of War” to the “Department of Defense.” Ironically, under the current administration, it has been informally rebranded back to the “Department of War,” and at least that’s honest. In 2025 alone, the United States conducted military strikes in seven countries: Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela. And that doesn’t account for operations already underway in 2026, including strikes on Iran and military operations in Ecuador and the Caribbean. According to researchers, the US has conducted counterterror operations in over 85 countries since 9/11, most of which the American public has never been told about.

From 2020 to 2024, private firms received $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts, approximately 54% of the department’s total discretionary spending. Meanwhile, the US spent between $9.65 billion and $12.07 billion on military activities across the wider Middle East from October 2023 through September 2025 alone, before a single shot was fired in the new Iran war. These are dollars not spent on healthcare, childcare, or the rising prices Americans keep asking policymakers to address.

If you agree with what I’m saying, you’re left with the hard question: What did our troops really die for? In some cases—the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and other conflicts that founded and secured our nation—they unquestionably died for our freedom and way of life. But I argue that most wars after those could have been avoided. They were the results of catastrophic foreign policy, driven by special interests, and produced costs far greater than any benefit to the American people.

Another question too few Americans ask themselves: How are our troops protecting our freedoms abroad when, every time they go out to fight some “evil dictator” or “spread democracy” to a foreign nation, our own government strips rights away here at home? The Patriot Act. The NDAA. Mass surveillance. Indefinite detention. Each new war abroad has been accompanied by new encroachments on liberty at home. We now have hundreds of military bases around the world and troops deployed across dozens of countries — yet we are told our freedoms are under threat and we are less safe than ever before.

When one of our helicopters goes down in Syria and everyone on board is killed, which of our freedoms was protected? When a convoy is hit by IEDs in a country we never should’ve occupied in the first place, what part of our way of life was preserved? When Americans are footing the bill for wars across seven countries simultaneously while our infrastructure crumbles, our healthcare system buckles, and our public education deteriorates, who exactly is being served?

Be honest with yourself, and you’ll arrive at the same conclusion I and millions of others have.

I’m not here to diminish the deaths of our troops on this Memorial Day. Despite the fact that most of the wars we’ve engaged in were unjust and driven by special interests, there’s one thing our troops genuinely did fight for: each other.

I was deployed to Iraq twice, once during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and again during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2004. Like most Marines and most Americans at the time, I was unaware our government was lying to us. But once we were in the warzone, the politics no longer mattered. It became life or death. Whether we should have been there or not, the only way out was to survive and fight our way through. That is precisely why we must remain vigilant and never allow our government to manipulate us into another conflict built on lies.

This is a hard pill to swallow, especially for those of us who have served, been injured, and lost our friends. But we cannot let patriotism and pride blind us to uncomfortable truths. That’s why I’m posting this on this particular day. It’s our responsibility as Americans to ensure we never put our troops in harm’s way without just cause, because it’s an absolute tragedy when we place them in situations where they must fight simply to survive. It’s a tragedy when we lose someone on our side. It’s a tragedy when the other side loses someone on theirs. And it’s made far worse when we are the aggressors, not the liberators we were told we were.

So please, enjoy your Memorial Day and honor the fallen as you should. But remember: to truly honor them, we must hold accountable the foreign lobbies, special interests, and political traitors who sent them to die in vain. Without that accountability, the Military Industrial Complex and its endless wars will never stop, and we will keep spending our hard-earned tax dollars and precious American blood on conflicts that serve everyone but us.

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