This Memorial Day, with its familiar trappings of parades and decorated graves, finds the nation at a crossroads. Americans will soon vote in a presidential election that will serve partly as a referendum on the wisdom of continuing to fight a war in Iraq.

That discussion can wait. Today imposes a more solemn duty -- to put aside differences and honor those who have fallen in their nation's service.

Soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors -- these are not the ones who start wars. In answering the call of honor, duty and tradition, these brave Americans have strived only to end the wars the nation has found itself in.

While a democratic people will argue about which war is necessary and just, these debates would not be possible unless men and women have the willingness and sense of self-sacrifice to pick up arms in the cause of freedom. Their virtue is the first and last guarantee of the nation's virtues, as it has always been from Bunker Hill through D-Day and Fallujah and all perilous points in between.

This generation of Americans has understood, as those during the Vietnam War did not, the necessity in their arguments of separating the warrior from the war. Strong supporters of the Iraq war may disagree, but we are a long way from the sour time when returning servicemen were treated with contempt. The anti-war sentiment of today is overwhelmingly not an anti-servicemen sentiment -- and that is to be cheered.

Memorial Day has come to mark the unofficial start of summer. A day off with the pleasures and pastimes of peace -- its picnics and games -- is not always conducive to thinking solemnly about the toll of war. Yet at a time of unequal sacrifice, the least people can do is spare a thought for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in wars new and old.

Spare a thought and a prayer, then, for heroes like Army Spc. Ross McGinnis, who grew up in Knox, Clarion County. As described in a front-page Post-Gazette story on May 11, he was just a kid who hated school and got into trouble before he became a soldier.

Yet when an Iraqi insurgent's grenade fell into a Humvee, he threw his back over the grenade to save the lives of his companions. He was only 19 when he died. On June 2 President Bush will award him posthumously the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award for valor.

Concerning this sacrifice, a Post-Gazette reader, Steve Burns of Upper St. Clair, wrote words that we cannot improve upon, words that we hope can inspire the remembrance for all the heroes who have fallen: "I'd like his parents to know that after reading the article, I felt proud to be part of a country that produces such brave men as their son, who gave his life to protect his brothers in arms and to protect the freedoms that all Americans cherish."