A Memorial Day Salute to Real Soldiers

They Actually Gave a Damn About This Country

Memorial Day used to mean something.

It used to be the day we honored men who actually fought to protect America, not to secure oil contracts for Halliburton or lithium deposits for Tesla. Men who believed this country was worth dying for, not because a recruiter promised them college tuition, but because they genuinely thought freedom mattered more than their own lives. I know this sounds like mythology in 2026, like I’m describing unicorns or honest politicians, but these men actually existed.

Let me show you what real sacrifice looked like before America became a mercenary force for billionaires. Let me tell you about my grandfathers, because if you want to understand what we’ve lost, you need to see what we had. These weren’t perfect men, they weren’t saints, but they cared about this country enough to risk everything for it. That matters. That SHOULD matter. And the fact that it doesn’t matter anymore should terrify you.

My grandfather Robert was fifteen years old when he decided the Navy needed him more than high school did. FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.

He got himself a fake ID (this was the early 1950s, so “fake ID” meant “someone’s cousin wrote a thing”), walked into a recruiting office, and lied his way onto a destroyer. For the next ten years, from age fifteen to twenty-five, he sailed around Asia shooting at people who were shooting back. He came home, married my grandmother, raised a family, and never once complained that his adolescence was spent dodging artillery in the Pacific.

My other grandfather Joe fought in Korea as a tank commander. He made it through basic training because he was the only guy in his unit who could READ WELL ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND COMPLEX ORDERS. Let that particular detail about American literacy rates in the 1950s simmer for a moment. They fast-tracked him to officer status because comprehending written instructions apparently qualified as a rare talent. He left Korea as a lieutenant with hundreds of tanks under his command.

Then, during a training exercise (because of course), a round detonated inside his tank. The explosion killed everyone else in the crew and BLEW JOE OUT OF THE HATCH, where he spent two days unconscious in a tree before someone thought to count the bodies in the wreckage and realized one was missing.

Two days in a tree, unconscious, while his unit presumably went about their business assuming he’d been vaporized with the rest of his crew. They found him, rushed him to a hospital, and he spent the next nine months drifting in and out of a coma. When he finally woke up enough to be discharged, he went home to rural New York, married my grandmother, and lived a long, quiet life. These are the men I think about on Memorial Day, and this is why I have very little patience for people who complain about hard things.

When America Actually Meant Something

The Greatest Generation gets that title for a reason, and it’s not because some marketing genius at a publishing house thought it sounded catchy. These were kids (KIDS, not “young adults” or “emerging adults” or whatever therapy-speak we use now to infantilize twenty-five-year-olds) who grew up in the Depression, watched fascism swallow Europe, and said “yeah okay I guess someone should probably do something about that.”

They didn’t demand trigger warnings before boot camp. They didn’t ask if the VA would cover their therapy. They didn’t form a committee to study the emotional impacts of getting shot at. They just WENT.

Sixteen million Americans served in World War II. That’s sixteen million people who put their actual lives on hold (or ended them entirely, which is notably permanent) because their country asked them to. Not because they’d get college tuition afterward. Not because it would look good on a resume. Not because an influencer told them it was the patriotic thing to do.

Because America was actually fighting for something that mattered.

(This really happened. America once fought wars that weren’t just resource grabs for Raytheon shareholders. I know this sounds like mythology, but there are photos and everything.)

The Others Who Fell

Korea gets forgotten between the Big One and Vietnam, but 36,000 Americans died there, including every other man in my grandfather Joe’s tank when a round detonated inside during that training exercise. They died in frozen trenches fighting proxy wars for politicians who couldn’t find Korea on a map six months earlier. They died so South Korea wouldn’t become North Korea, which, given what we know about North Korea now, seems like it was probably worth doing even if Douglas MacArthur was completely unhinged.

Vietnam gets remembered, but mostly for the protests and the politics and the Pentagon Papers and everything EXCEPT the 58,000 Americans who died there. They died in jungles fighting an enemy they couldn’t see for a cause their own government didn’t believe in. We sent them anyway, then we spit on them when they came home, because apparently fighting in an unjust war makes you complicit rather than a victim of the people who sent you there.

Iraq and Afghanistan produced another 7,000 dead Americans over twenty years of occupation that accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except making defense contractors richer than small nations. We’re still not sure what we were doing there at the end, and neither were the guys we sent to do it. But they went anyway, because when America says “we need you to go die in this desert for reasons we’ll explain later (we will not explain later),” they GO. They keep going, deployment after deployment, because that’s what soldiers do even when the people giving them orders don’t deserve their obedience. That’s what makes them heroes, not the wars themselves, which are mostly garbage designed to transfer taxpayer money into private hands.

Here’s What Changed

The guys who died on Omaha Beach fought actual Nazis. The kind with swastikas and genocide and plans for world domination. Not the kind we call people on Twitter because they disagree about tax policy. ACTUAL NAZIS. The guys who died at Iwo Jima were stopping Imperial Japan from conquering the Pacific.

My grandfathers Robert and Joe both fought in Korea to keep the Kim family from enslaving an entire peninsula. Seems like a worthy goal. The millions of South Koreans who aren’t currently starving in labor camps probably agree. They were stopping communist expansion, fighting for something that actually mattered even if Korea gets forgotten between the Big One and Vietnam.

The guys fighting ‘against’ Iran right now are protecting what, exactly? Israeli security interests? Defense contractor quarterly earnings? I genuinely don’t know and neither does anyone else, including the Mossad-assets in our government who planned the attack.

This is where Memorial Day gets complicated in 2026.

We’re supposed to honor the fallen. I do. I honor them completely. My grandfathers taught me what duty looks like. What sacrifice means. What it costs to defend something bigger than yourself.

But what are we defending NOW? Not America, that’s for sure. We’re not defending America. America isn’t being invaded. No foreign power is threatening our sovereignty. Nobody’s marching on Washington. The only people threatening American democracy are AMERICANS, and we’re not allowed to shoot at those guys because they wear expensive suits and own media companies.

So what are we defending? We’re defending ExxonMobil’s extraction rights in contested territories. We’re defending Lockheed Martin’s revenue projections. We’re defending Saudi Arabia’s regional interests (because they own enough of our debt to demand it). We’re defending Israel’s expansion plans (because AIPAC owns enough of Congress to mandate it). We’re defending BlackRock’s portfolio positions in resource-rich nations that happen to have governments we don’t like.

We’re not defending America. We’re defending the financial interests of people who wouldn’t piss on a burning soldier if it meant missing their tee time. That’s not hyperbole and it’s not conspiracy theory, it’s just what happens when your foreign policy is written by think tanks funded by defense contractors, energy companies, and foreign governments.

The Part Where I Sound Crazy (But I’m Not)

My grandfathers fought for THIS COUNTRY, the actual dirt and people and flag and idea of America. They believed in something real. The guys deployed right now are fighting for quarterly earnings reports, and that’s not hyperbole or conspiracy theory, that’s just what happens when your foreign policy is written by think tanks funded by defense contractors, energy companies, and foreign governments.

The Greatest Generation was great because they fought in wars that NEEDED fighting. They weren’t perfect, no generation is, but when they shipped out they were protecting something that actually required protection. Now we send kids to die so Larry Fink can diversify his portfolio, and we’re about to make it SO MUCH WORSE with the wars being planned right now.

The Wars Being Planned Right Now

Speaking of dystopian futures (smooth transition, right?), let me tell you about the war I’m currently losing. Not in Iran, not in some desert, but right here in New York fighting against AI data centers. You know what’s more dangerous than a bomb? A technology that makes humans obsolete. You know what’s more destructive than a war? An economic system that treats people as disposable inputs in an algorithm designed to maximize profit for people who have more money than God and less conscience than a tapeworm.

These AI data centers are going up EVERYWHERE, in my backyard and in yours. Massive facilities consuming more electricity than small cities, spewing heat and pollution, so tech billionaires can build their demon-spawn neural networks and replace every job that doesn’t involve owning capital. They’re turning New York into a server farm, building the infrastructure for the complete automation of human labor, which sounds great until you realize that the people building it have NO PLAN for what happens to the billions of people they’re about to make economically irrelevant.

I’ve been fighting this for two years. I’ve filed dozens of complaints with local, state, and federal agencies. I’ve submitted environmental impact studies, documented violations, written thousands of pages of testimony. Know what’s happened? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Nothing at all, because the billionaires building these facilities own the politicians who would need to stop them, because the tech companies funding these projects employ the lobbyists who write the regulations that are supposed to constrain them, because the people who could fix this are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE profiting from it.

So now I’m doing what I should have done two years ago: I’m hiring a lawyer. A REAL lawyer, not me filing pro se paperwork that gets mysteriously “lost” or “misfiled” or “processed” into a bureaucratic black hole. An actual attorney who knows how to make rich people uncomfortable, because my grandfathers taught me something important about what you do when something matters.

When something matters, you fight. You don’t whine, you don’t surrender, you don’t accept defeat because the other side has more money and more power and more friends in high places. You just FIGHT. They fought in Korea with bullets, I’m fighting tech billionaires with lawyers, and it’s different tools but the same war.

What I Need From You

Here’s the thing about hiring lawyers who can actually challenge billionaires: they’re not cheap. Shocking, I know. Turns out attorneys who specialize in David-versus-Goliath environmental cases against multinational corporations don’t work for Applebee’s gift cards and good vibes. I’m not asking you to storm a beach or sail around Asia for ten years shooting at strangers or spend nine months in a coma after getting blown out of a tank. I’m asking you to help me pay someone who can slow these bastards down before they turn our entire planet into a science fiction dystopia full of demon-named AI data centers and armies of killer robots. That’s the choice, that’s where we are, and we don’t have much time left to make it.

My grandfathers fought for America when America was worth fighting for, and now I’m fighting to make sure there’s still an America worth passing down to the next generation, a version that isn’t just a corporate subdivision of Amazon-Google-Microsoft-Meta where humans still matter more than quarterly earnings. If you believe that fight matters, help me hire the lawyer who can actually win it. If this article meant something to you, if you understand what we’re losing, if you remember when America stood for something bigger than Lockheed Martin’s bottom line, then become a paid subscriber and help me take these billionaire parasites to court and make them explain why their server farms matter more than breathable air.

My grandfathers didn’t quit when things got hard, and I’m not quitting either, but I can’t do this alone because wars aren’t won by lone heroes, they’re won by people who stand together and refuse to surrender.

So stand with me and help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

---

Want more Wise Wolf? Check out this free article: