This is going to sound terrible, but I have to confess that Memorial Day doesn’t hold a lot of personal meaning for me. I don’t come from a military family, and I’m not what most Americans today would consider “patriotic.” I am, however, a romantic and a sentimentalist. Here’s a Memorial Day story that brought a lump to my throat: sixty-nine years ago, a young American corporal was killed in the Pacific by a Japanese sniper. His last wish was that the diary he’d kept of his wartime experiences be sent to his high-school sweetheart, who’d given him the book in the first place as a gift. Somehow, though, the diary never made it back to her.

Decades later, that girl — now 90 years old — finally got to read the words of her long-lost boyfriend when she recently spotted the diary in a display case at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. I can only imagine what must’ve been going through her head and her heart at the moment that she recognized herself  in those yellowed pages beneath the glass… thoughts of a life cut short, and of another life that might have been, the inevitable outcome of all wars… even the so-called “good” ones.

It’s worth your time to read the details here, and give them some thought as you grill your burgers this afternoon.