My shoes got muddy last week. Spit-shined, black dress shoes. Walking through Golden Gate National Cemetery near San Francisco, 161 acres overlooking the bay, waves of white marble markers riding the contours of the terrain.

139,037 graves.

I’m no redneck patriot. I’m not a veteran. My nearest relative with military service is my paternal grandfather, who worked a desk job during World War I. I just felt compelled to pay my respects.

I felt relief to notice the vast majority buried here died at home. The year of death, if it falls during a period of conflict, suggests death by enemy fire, but there’s no marking like “KIA” on the grave to answer the question.

It’s the KIAs that bother me. I feel sorrow for the dead and their loved ones. Anger over the lives thrown away with casual disregard or lost due to incompetent leadership. Gratitude to those who fought to protect us. Pride in those who fought to protect others.

Outrage that so many lives were thrown away so often for no good reason.

I admire our warriors. They bust their butts to be ready. They dive on grenades for no reward other than the gratitude of their buddies. They pledge their willingness to violate our society’s greatest taboo to kill on our behalf, putting their bodies as well as their minds on the line.

Ask any combat veteran what he feels when he kills. Most won’t answer, so imagine: Pull a trigger, see a man’s body torn apart. Push a button, see a tank explode, broken men on fire crawling from the wreckage. Drop a bomb, incinerate 100,000 people under a mushroom cloud. Thrust a knife into a man’s throat and smell the blood as it spurts over your hands.

These are the things we ask our warriors to do. How dare we send our young men and women into combat out of any but the purest motives, without a clear sense of purpose that would motivate us to go ourselves if we could?

It’s easy. We delegate that decision and we don’t think through the implications. We never see a flag-draped casket because so few of us send a child to become a warrior. At any given moment, only one in a thousand US families have a relative in Iraq. The odds you know a soldier in harm’s way are low.

And even fewer of us have gotten our shoes muddy standing in a rain-soaked cemetery watching that flag-draped casket being lowered into the ground. Memorial Day comes as just another three-day weekend. Veteran’s Day passes as just another parade. We don’t think about where those old men in funny hats have been, what they’ve done, or why.

Thanks to smart generals like Petraeus, we’ll get most of our soldiers out of Iraq soon. About 50,000 will stay to make sure the mess we made doesn’t get worse.

But where do the others go next? Afghanistan, a country that repeatedly swallows up tens of thousands of valiant fighting men from world powers like Great Britain and Russia. Afghanistan’s ragtag bands of tribal warriors, helped by the mountains and the weather, always win. What makes us think this time will be different?

Arrogance, pure arrogance. Blend that with ignorance of history to make a palatable brew of mind-numbing myth. Sprinkle with our collective reluctance to get our shoes muddy on the battlefield of ideas.

Let’s at least exhaust our fingers sending emails to our elected representatives. Every email carries the weight of a hundred votes. That’s the force multiplier our warriors need most.