Just as we have on previous Memorial Days, my wife and I will play taps Monday in a small-town cemetery.

Our habit began after reading an editorial about Americans losing sight of the holiday’s meaning, thinking of it as the seasonal start of trips to picnic grounds and summer cottages. It was accompanied by a story about the dwindling ranks of buglers.

Now, there was a problem with which we could help out.

We play the harmonica, which can mimic a bugle’s mournful sound. Piety, like charity, begins at home, so we thought we would play taps in the Jewish section of a cemetery in La Porte, Indiana, where we have a home. Its Jewish community has shrunk, so we figured that gravestones marked with a Star of David might not have visitors.

The sea of flags with which American Legion Post 83 marks veterans’ graves makes an indelible point: Those who lie there didn’t go off to war as Christians or Jews or whatever. They were just Americans who answered their country’s call.

We can only play taps a few times without messing it up. Musically it’s not complicated — just 24 notes. But each one is freighted with emotion. If either of us happens to glance at a gravestone with, say, a 1944 date of death, we’ll never make through to that last long, gently fading note without sobbing. 1944 — think of that. It means that a vet could have fallen during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Or, perhaps he was killed during a World War II battle on some barely remembered South Pacific island.

Of all of mankind’s problems, war is the one we’ve not put so much as a dent in.

Cures have been found for once epidemic diseases. We live much longer and infinitely more comfortably than our ancestors. Transplant surgeons give renewed life to those whose hearts or kidneys have failed. Medical advances save wounded soldiers who once would have died on a battlefield. But war, the cause of those wounds? Is there a scrap of evidence we are close to — nay, even within a reasonable distance — of finding a cure?

Absolutely not, to judge by the pattern of the past as it is inscribed on the tombstones of that Indiana cemetery. They witness recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, older ones in Vietnam and Korea, and still more distant ones like World War I and II and the Spanish American War. The oldest tombstones are weather worn. Maybe their illegible inscriptions commemorate those who served in the Civil War, conceivably even the War of 1812.

It’s not that men and women haven’t yearned for an alternative. There is a Nobel Peace Prize. Theodore Roosevelt won for helping end a war between Russia and Japan. In retrospect, the citation for 1929 winner Frank B. Kellogg sounds hopelessly naive: “For the Kellogg-Briand pact, whose signatories agreed to settle all conflicts by peaceful means and renounced war as an instrument of national policy.”

Among those who signed on were Germany, Italy and Japan, who went on to fight World War II against fellow signers like the U.S., England, France and the Soviet Union. Yet, as the Bible says: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

So too are those who have fought for a just cause, while forswearing recourse to violence. Like Ghandi and Martin Luther King.

Yet unless the rest of us adopt their unbending pacifism, war will be with us on every Memorial Day. My wife and I plan to acknowledge that ultimately sad fact of life by pausing at an undeveloped section of the cemetery. Looking out over a grassy field that someday will be dotted with flags.

Then we’ll play taps, stretching that final note even longer, hopefully sending its echoes into the future.

Ron Grossman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.