It’s easy to think of war in abstract terms: politicians debating the numbers and the dollars; the impersonal, colourless news reports about another IED blast; serious, grave matters that are spun into fictionalized Hollywood mythology. But on this Remembrance Day, we’ve picked a few items that aren’t funny or viral and cute — they are important. On the 11th day of the 11th month, please read and remember.

• "The Things that Carried Him," an Esquire story by Canadian writer Chris Jones, is a few years old, but it’s worth reading today because it tells what must be undertaken to bring a soldier home after he or she dies in the field. It is, as Jones puts it, about "the start of one journey and the end of another."
• Ken Udstad, an American stationed in the Pacific during WWII, took a flag from the jacket of a dead Japanese soldier. Some 60 years later, he wants to return the memento to that soldier’s family.
• Why do Canadian soldiers go to Afghanistan? Watch Fighting Ghosts, a CBC documentary made up entirely of footage shot by machine gunner Glen Villa, as he describes life, IEDs and Taliban attacks on the front lines.