Hegseth shatters the silence at Arlington. The dead deserve better.

After the carnage of World War I, Americans grieved particularly for the soldiers whose bodies were left behind in France, and for the several thousand whose remains were never identified. It was a political issue, a cultural wound and it changed how we memorialized the fallen, from a local to a national duty. The Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his entourage were admonished Tuesday for acting disrespectfully, was a response to that trauma.