How do you get your children to understand what Memorial Day is really about?

I never had been able to figure out how to convey to my children -- at the gut level, where genuine gratitude lives -- why it is that "Happy Memorial Day" ought to be something of an oxymoron. The American fighting man has done his job too well, and there are entire generations who have grown up with no conception of the cost of freedom (as witness the fact that half the country thinks that the loss of 4,000 American soldiers over four years -- compare 2,400 American deaths at Omaha Beach alone, 80,000 dead in Vietnam, and 45,000 dead every year in American automobile accidents -- is a shocking bloodbath that requires our retreat from the field of battle, despite the disastrous long-term consequences such a retreat would engender).

So this year I decided to try something different. I gathered the family in the living room (attendance mandatory, to the disgust of some of the teenagers) and talked to them about what life was like under Saddam Hussein, or under Stalin (my three teenaged Kazakhstani girls nodded their heads and muttered assent at that point, remembering their history classes), and explained to them that it is honorable soldiers who stand between us and such persons and allow us to live in freedom and peace.

I talked about the 60,000,000 who died in World War II, and I invited them to imagine walking through 30 cities the size of Houston, back to back, and seeing nothing but corpses. Here again, my ethnically Russian Natasha, who grew up in the shambles and detritus of the Soviet Union, spoke up to mention the 80% of Russian men of military age who died in that war. I mentioned Aliya Moldagulova (a Kazakh girl who served with distinction as a sniper in the seige of Stalingrad before falling in battle), whose statue all of my girls have seen in one of the central parks in Almaty, and at that point even wise-cracking, solemnity-undermining, only-here-under-extreme-protest Kinya got interested in spite of herself, and remembered that her grandfather had been in the Soviet Army. (Anya's and Kinya's father also served in the Soviet navy.)

I pointed out that every soldier we have in Iraq today is a volunteer. I explained to my kids that most of them are soldiers who could have come back home long ago, but who reenlisted in order to continue the fight against the evil they've seen close-up, evil to defeat which they are willing to risk torture and death.

Which was all just me talking to them, and you know how much good that does. But then...well, then I banished Merry and Rusty and Sally from the room and hit the play button on the DVD remote, and we sat together and watched the first half-hour or so of Saving Private Ryan, up through the point at which the general reads Lincoln's letter to the woman who lost all five of her sons in the Civil War.

Well. It worked. It worked, much better than I expected. There was silence from the moment the first cross in the cemetery came into shot, and, except for the occasional gasp and choked sob (and one fist-pumping cheer from Sean when an American sniper picked off a German machine-gunner), that silence was unbroken until I clicked the pause button after the general's reading of Lincoln's letter. Still nobody spoke or moved for several seconds. Then I said, quietly, something along the lines of, "And that is why we stop every Memorial Day to remember the men and women who fight to defend us, and that is why you do not say, 'Happy Memorial Day.'"

There was more silence for twenty or thirty seconds, and then I said, "You should all know that most of the young men in that invasion were younger than Anya is." Six pairs of eyes widened in shock.

After ten or fifteen more seconds I told them, "Look, if any of you want to watch the rest of this movie, you can, but if you want to leave now, that's okay." And most of the kids got up and quietly left the room, but a couple of the older girls stuck around and we talked for awhile about democracies and wars, about why people didn't take Hitler seriously and didn't stop him when they could have done so at relatively little cost, about how democracies generally let all problems go until they become catastrophes and only then, at a cost grotesquely more exorbitant than should have been necessary, do they finally solve those problems.

So I think this will become an annual ritual in our family.

And if you are, or ever have been, a member of America's armed forces...

Thank you.