All over the country today, drums will roll and buglers will play taps. There will be parades and salutes and flags unfurled, and many will pause in gratitude to those who have died in our wars. For thousands who lost friends and lovers and children, the unhealed sorrow will return, at least for a day, as they remember those who served their country and will be 21 forever.

Inevitably, some politicians will pronounce the words "we are at war" and try to make the campaign against terrorism into the equivalent of a real war. They will apply the label "wartime President" to President Bush. They will insist that any criticism of the "war" or the President is a form of subversion or treason. But Memorial Day should remind us of the distinctions between cheap, careless rhetoric and lacerating reality. It should give us a sense of proportion.

For when each bugler raises his horn to play taps, he will play for the dead and maimed of Gettysburg, where Robert E. Lee lost 28,000 men in three days of fighting while the victorious Union commander, George Gordon Meade, lost 25,000. The bugler will play for the 23,000 men shot at Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862, in the bloodiest day of the Civil War, and for all the others — 620,000 — who died on both sides of that ferocious conflict.

He will play, too, for Abraham Lincoln, a true wartime President murdered within days of the end of the conflict.

The buglers will play their mournful tune for the 112,000 American dead of World War I, that disgusting exercise in slaughter and carnage. Few will remember the wider context of the mass killing, since history is so badly taught to Americans.

On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 20,000 in the British Army were killed, and 40,000 were wounded (many of them Irish foot soldiers). The gain after that one bloody day was about 1,000 yards. By the time this invincibly stupid campaign ended five months later, after a total advance of 7 miles, there were 650,000 German casualties, 418,000 British and 195,000 French. That was what was meant by a war, in the age of the machine gun, heavy artillery, airplanes and poison gas.

At Verdun, where fighting lasted 10 months in 1916, the French lost 377,231 men, the Germans 337,000, and the Earth was turned into the dark side of the moon. That was what awaited the Americans when Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. By June, American troops were in France.

'Patriotism' in the Air

At home, many antiwar protesters were arrested, jailed or deported. Jingoism and manufactured "patriotism" were in the air. All summer, the great patriots of the American South protested the stationing of African-American troops on their holy soil; in August, riots against black soldiers broke out in Houston and left 17 people dead.

Some patriots.

The Americans who saw combat fought bravely, and probably were decisive in turning back the last German offensive in 1918. But compared with the wider carnage, they paid a relatively small price. The U.S. lost 112,000 dead (about half in combat), from a total of 10 million dead soldiers. France alone lost half its men between the ages of 20 and 32.

That was a war. Woodrow Wilson, for all his flaws, was a wartime President.

The next war was also a true war, and Franklin Roosevelt was a true wartime President. Think only of Anzio, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima or Okinawa. Thousands of young men who died in such places are buried in Arlington and other American cemeteries. So are those among the 47,000 who died in the Korean War, at the Yalu, in Pusan. Along with those among the 55,000 who died in Vietnam, in the Iron Triangle, at Khe Sanh, at Hue during the Tet offensive.

Shadowy Enemy

But the fight against terrorism is not a war in any true sense of that word. It is not being fought against a state. The enemy is a shadowy group of religious fanatics, men without countries or headquarters or armies. On Sept. 11, they committed mass murder in the U.S.

The Americans were absolutely justified in driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan, and pursuing Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and their allies. Bush is justified in wanting to bring them to justice.

But the "war" on terrorism more accurately resembles the ongoing "war" on drugs. (American military advisers are serving in Colombia against the narcoguerrillas of the the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.)

It's a police campaign. Since driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan with devastating air power, the American military and its allies on the ground have been engaged in a police operation, working the way SWAT teams work. They're looking for murderers and gathering evidence against them. They are not fighting a true war. We have no accurate count of the Afghan dead, but American combat deaths, so far, are less than 20.

Each of those deaths is a dreadful fact for the families of those killed. But they don't make a war. The "Black Hawk Down" expedition to Somalia (1992-93) cost us 29 dead. The intentions were noble — to relieve human suffering — but it was not a war. The invasion of Panama in late 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega cost us 23 dead, along with an estimated 2,000 Panamanians. It was the bloodiest drug bust in world history, but it wasn't a war. One comparison: In 2001, 232 U.S. police officers lost their lives, including those who died on Sept. 11.

Key Elements

In a true war, we would return to the military draft, so that men and women of all classes would share the sacrifice. We would raise taxes to pay for that war, instead of cutting them to get votes. We'd put a limit on war profits.

On the home front, we'd have war-bond drives and scrap-metal collections, and even the comic-strip heroes would go off to fight while Tin Pan Alley churned out songs. We'd see gold stars in many American windows. We certainly would not allow ourselves to be lectured about patriotism by the likes of Vice President Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who managed a combined 11 Vietnam draft deferments. Today, Bush visits Normandy to pay tribute to our honored dead.

On June 6, 1944, American soldiers alone took 3,000 casualties in the ferocious tides and sands of Omaha Beach.

That was a war.

The buglers at the Normandy cemetery will play today for all those who never came home. Their war should not be trivialized by empty words.