Memorial Day is the one day, or weekend, set aside each year as a time for solemn remembrance of those who have given their lives in America’s wars.
Public observances of this holiday traditionally occur within families and local communities, and on a larger scale at such places as Arlington National Cemetery. At the more than two dozen cemeteries overseas, where close to half of the American dead from the two World Wars are buried or remembered as missing, thousands of people from the numerous host countries typically attend such ceremonies as well.
Measures spawned of the COVID pandemic greatly restricted the outward observance of Memorial Day last year. Even this year, the ceremonies at our overseas cemeteries will once again be closed to the public. Not since the forces of Hitler’s Germany occupied American cemeteries in France and Belgium during the 1940s has this hallowed national ritual been so disrupted at those sites.
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