Take time out for a minutes or so to honor our War Veterans.This is the day to Honor Them.

In 1945, Bill Onufry spent weeks on a hell ship, an old vessel on which the Japanese transported prisoners during World War II. Conditions were hellish indeed.

Onufry often drew burial detail. This meant disposing of the bodies of Americans who had died in the night. Onufry and another man used ropes to pull the corpses up a ladder from the hold, followed the orders of the Japanese guards to strip them bare and threw the bodies over the ship's fantail into the ocean.

Onufry, who lives in Freedom, can never forget the sight of the legs and arms of these dead soldiers pitching upward in the churn behind the ship. What bothers him just as much is how anonymous his comrades-in-arms had become, how no one would ever really know just who they were or when they died.

Memorial Day used to be more of a national day of paying respect to the war dead than it is today. Especially in the years just after America's biggest wars, the Civil War and World War II, the rituals of mourning and honoring these dead were deeply personal. Not everyone had lost a family member, but everyone at least knew someone who had.

As Drew Gilpin Faust wrote in her recent book, This Republic of Suffering, the nature and scale of death even in the Civil War challenged the notion of "the good death." Soldiers often believed they were fighting and dying for a glorious cause, but there was little glory in being mowed down on Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg or slaughtered in the Crater at Petersburg.

After the battle of Antietam, which is still the bloodiest day in American history, the relatively new art of photography brought pictures of anonymous bloated bodies into public view.

Through these images, death in numbers that Americans could scarcely fathom took on a gruesome reality.

For men in the field, what died along with the multitudes was the notion of speaking a patriot's parting words, of contemplating meeting your maker and of lying in state while loved ones mourned over you.

Because so much fighting was done on the same ground in Virginia, many men wrote home about marching past old fields where the skulls and bones of soldiers killed in earlier battles lay decaying.

"It is dreadful to contemplate being killed on the field of battle without a kind hand to hide one's remains from the eye of the world or the gnawing of animals and buzzards," wrote Confederate Thomas J. Key.

The military is now much better than it was during the Civil War or World War II at retrieving and honoring the dead. Still, the nature of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq leaves little room for the romantic notion of the good death. IEDs, the euphemistic acronym for powerful roadside bombs, obliterate soldiers' bodies instantly and without warning.

Much effort has gone into making these deaths, and indeed the wars themselves, invisible to the public. And the public has, unwittingly perhaps but certainly not to its credit, become complacent about the wars and their human cost. Unless the death toll approaches a milestone, it is generally a silent drip that disturbs the sleep of only the loved ones of the deceased.

It is probably an unwelcome act to intrude upon the public's leisure today with remarks about the obsolete idea of the good death in battle. Yet it is Memorial Day - a day when it really is important to remember not only what America's heroes sacrificed themselves for, but also the reality of their sacrifices.