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Memorial Day, looming tomorrow, isn’t about honoring veterans. There’s Veterans Day for that.

It certainly isn’t about an extra day off work or an excuse to have a sale on barbecue grills.

Memorial Day is set aside to honor the nation’s war dead. All the dead. All the wars.

When volunteers from Military Families Speak Out, Veterans For Peace, Naples For Peace, Broward For Peace and other groups place crosses on the beach this Memorial Day to symbolize the deaths of more than 2,400 soldiers in Iraq, they are exercising the free speech the deaths of so many over the years have guaranteed. They have every right to do so and inasmuch as the names called out are war dead, their ceremony is appropriate.

But the political message that so often accompanies these beach observances — that the deaths are proof that the war in Iraq is wrong — is misplaced.

All of America’s wars have led to the tragic deaths of young people whose potential has gone forever unrealized.

And every war has been unpopular at certain moments in certain segments of society. History tells us that in the darkest days of the most monumental conflicts, public opinion called out for a quick end and that victory seemed uncertain.

That same history proves that in many cases, the naysayers were wrong.

Three years into the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was so reviled that his own party’s nomination to run for re-election was in doubt. The Democratic Party platform in the presidential election of 1864 stated “that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war ... under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution ... that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.”

But that summer, the war began to turn — at terrible cost in lives — in favor of the Union. At the Battle of Cold Harbor in June 1864, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant lost 7,000 troops in a space of 20 minutes. It marked the beginning of a series of Union attacks that sapped the Confederates’ strength in advance of their eventual surrender less than a year later.

Just prior to D-Day in June 1944, the prospects for victory were so uncertain that Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower composed a letter accepting full responsibility for the disaster he feared might ensue.

In his autobiography, Gen. Omar Bradley wrote that from reports he received of the D-Day carnage on Omaha Beach, he believed the assault there “had suffered an irreversible catastrophe.” He considered evacuating the beach, but later in the afternoon, with reports of the attack moving inland, he reconsidered. About 10,000 Allied troops were killed or wounded at Normandy that day.

Victory often comes at a high price and is not always apparent through the smoke of battle.

Time will tell if the effort in Iraq leads to a stable, prosperous country that can serve as a beacon of freedom to the rest of the Middle East or if it is an intractable quagmire from which there can be only retreat.

But on this Memorial Day it is not fitting, or even possible, to make that determination. Rather it is time to honor the sacrifices made by the soldiers who have died in this, and every other, American war.

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Brent Batten’s e-mail address is: bebatten@naplesnews.com.