A tribute to the valiant

Onward marches the Big Parade, forever into the somber beyond. A column of the young and the brave. Of the dutiful. When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can! - Emerson Pictured here this Memorial Day is Sgt. James G. Johnston, the sole service member from New York State whose line-of-duty death was recorded since last Memorial Day.

Called by duty, gone to war. Gone to flowers.

On this day, we pause to mourn him — and all those who did not come home from the battlefields. The dead of this war. The dead of the last war. The dead of all past wars. To honor their sacrifices. To humbly offer them our gratitude and our prayers. To assure their loved ones that we, the living, do not forget. Cannot forget. Must not forget. Johnston fell in Afghanistan, a war that began 19 years ago which has claimed more than 2,400 American lives and half that many allied troops and where several thousand American warriors still remain.

Others fight and risk and give their lives elsewhere — like Iraq, Yemen and Syria — in shadow wars, unconventional, undeclared, but every bit as real, as well as battlefields unnamed and unknown.

Without the gallant likes of these heroes, the horrors visited upon the United States one lovely late summer morning in 2001 might well already have come again.

The measure of these wars, as with all the wars this nation has fought, will be taken by the children.

Your children. Our children. And their children.

And those whose loved ones are remembered here today.

Loved ones who now march in the Big Parade. Loved ones who now live on eternally, in the aching hearts left behind.

Here, on another Memorial Day, in fields of flowers, we salute and celebrate our unforgotten.

They who donned the uniform and wore it dutifully while they lived.

They who will surely wear it proudly for all the rest of time.

Forevermore. As the Big Parade marches on, into the beyond.