David Loesch, a veteran of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne and the Vietnam War, reaches out to touch a fallen comrade's name etched into the black granite at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Memorial Day on May 25, 2026 in Washington, D.C. Samuel Corum/Getty Images
This is a lightly edited transcript of a May 26 segment of the Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words podcast.
This Monday was Memorial Day. It commemorated all the Americans who died on behalf of the United States from its beginning to the present. It started out as Decoration Day. It was a phenomenon that grew out of the horrific Civil War in which 650,0000–700,000 Americans, North and South, died.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian. He is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University, a fellow of Hillsdale College, and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Mr. Hanson has written 17 books, including “The Western Way of War,” “Fields Without Dreams,” “The Case for Trump,” and “The Dying Citizen.”
