We celebrate Memorial Day this coming Monday, May 29, recalling the men and women who have died in service to the United States. It is a lot of remembering to do.

Americans have been involved in major conflicts eight times since the Revolutionary War granted us freedom from British rule, as well as being involved in numerous lesser acknowledged altercations on our own soil and around the world. Before the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, 25,000 rebel soldiers gave their lives. Just over 80 years later, American deaths in the Civil War numbered an astounding 625,000, more than would give their lives in the two World Wars to follow.

The Korean conflict left us with more than 35,000 Americans not coming home, and more than 58,000 men and women died before the US military involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973. Loss of American lives in the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq add up to more than 7,000. In total, well over 1.3 million US lives have been sacrificed to protect our country. It is a tragically large number, but one that does not encompass the nearly two million troops injured, nor does it take into account the millions more relatives impacted by the deaths and injuries inflicted by war. That total is devastating to think about.

It is because those numbers are so terrible to contemplate that we do set aside a day each year that puts the focus on those sacrifices. All across the nation memorial services will pay honor to these lives, and pay homage to the tens of thousands of American troops stationed around the world to keep us safe. In Newtown, remembrance ceremonies will take place at the VFW on Freedom Defenders Way, off of Wasserman Way, at 11 am.

Man has been exhorted for thousands of years to seek peace over war, to love one anther, to "Make love, not war." It seems to be a calling we are unable to answer. Who starts the wars, and who fights the wars are usually not one and the same. It is the population that longs for a world of respect and cooperation who must take up arms, not the leaders who taunt and bully each other until the deadly call to war is issued. The use of force to push a policy of peace seems contradictory.

Until world leaders embrace a means of peacefully resolving conflicts and accept cultural differences; until world leaders agree that the financial cost and lives lost in war are a burden too great to bear; until the clamor for peace becomes so great, worldwide, that leaders must listen, we will continue to commemorate millions more whose productive futures are cut short.

We yearn for a time when war is a memory and soldiers' swords are turned to plowshares, leaving them to simply be compassionate guardians of the country.

Honor the memory of those soldiers who have died for our country's freedom this Memorial Day, but nurture the hope that world leaders will turn away from future conflicts that increase those numbers every year.