Commentary: We’re still asking, what good is war?

I’m walking in Arlington National Cemetery on the Sunday before Veteran’s Day. I can feel the weather changing and within minutes have to put on my coat again as I make my way across the grounds.

I haven’t been here since I was 12, when I came to Washington, D.C., on a class trip. It had been one year since I had gone through the traumatizing experience of being placed in an Armenian private school. Up until that point, I had been a public school kid, attending classes with probably more than 1,000 kids, taking yearbook workshops that would cement my love affair with journalism and trying to navigate the most awkward years one can have in life, one outfit at a time.

Soon enough, I was thrust into a class of no more than 30 kids who had grown up together since preschool, made to wear a uniform and forced to stay up nights with my parents to master this new, bizarre world of Armenian grammar and monthly Mass in the auditorium.

But I made friends fast, many of whom I am close with to this day. Every class before ours had taken a trip to Armenia. For some reason, we went to Washington, D.C.

It sounded like the worst trade-off possible — one week in a city in the United States versus an international trip to a country reeling from its lingering Soviet legacy — but looking back I would never give up those moments with my new friends in the capitol. It was a time that cemented a significant change in my young life.

I think about this while I continue walking. I’ve come here on my last day in D.C., as a break from the conference I was attending, to see the autumn colors that we Southern Californians rarely get a chance to experience.

Despite the fact that there are so many people around, some tourists, others on the hunt for the graves of family members, it is almost silent.

I can hear the sound of my own footsteps on what looks like new, black, squishy gravel, on grass, on the leaves falling on the edges of the wide roads on which large, American SUVs drive slowly, looking for the graves that are easier to spot if you’re walking.

It’s getting colder, and my low California-created tolerance for anything below 70 degrees is embarrassingly becoming evident. Still, I keep walking. I make a loop around one section of the cemetery, reading headstones, looking up to see the colors of the trees.

I come across an entire section with fresh flowers and even a pumpkin or two. But as I stop to read, an overwhelming feeling of sadness catches me completely by surprise. I don’t get sad at cemeteries. This time, however, it’s crushing me.

Every headstone I read belongs to someone around my age or younger. Their parents have visited them. They’ve left roses, Halloween trinkets and messages.

“Love you and miss you more than you know,” someone has written on a pumpkin. In another note, a mother calls her son her biggest hero.

A few feet away, a father sits in a chair in front of his son’s grave.

These lives, the ones in the ground before me here and the ones who leave the messages and flowers, have forever been changed. Sacrifices were made for the common good. For love of country, for patriotism, as the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs’ website notes.

I remember standing there, struggling more than ever to come to terms with why this had to be. Was it all necessary? I knew that sometimes it was necessary, but it didn’t make sense. I was frozen, looking at headstones looking back at me, and knowing that the people they belonged to were my age, had some of my fears, faced some of my challenges, perhaps shared in some of my joys growing up.

Except I was here, and they were not. If the world had tried harder, I thought, maybe this wouldn’t be the case. I tried to make peace with it, fast. Time was running out and I had a flight to catch. But all that kept ringing in my ears as I walked were the lyrics to that late-’60s song: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.”

LIANA AGHAJANIAN is a Los Angeles-based journalist whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, Paste magazine, New America Media, Eurasianet and The Atlantic. She may be reached at liana.agh@gmail.com.