My 90-year-old father-in-law is a veteran of World War II. He doesn’t talk much about his service, unless he’s had a cocktail or two beyond what is advisable. According to the official records, however, he was a teenaged Navy signalman attached to the 1^st Marine Division. He was on Peleliu and Okinawa, and spent time in China in the war’s immediate aftermath.

If you live long enough, you start getting asked to stuff. This spring he was asked to ride in the 500 Festival Parade, which is why the missus and I, along with mother-in-law, were among the 300,000 last Saturday who watched him and a dozen of his fellow WWII vets ride past in vintage Jeeps done up in authentic WWII olive drab.

My father-in-law is bemused be all the attention. Ask him and he will tell you flat out that he did nothing special – which, I guess, is what makes him and others of his generation extremely special.

On race day, I watched on TV as 33 drivers and 350,000 slowly roasting fans collaborated to put together one of the most colorful and exciting races in recent memory. Sunday afternoon, 12 of us went on board the family money pit and got in some sailing.

I finished up the holiday at Kokomo Municipal Stadium with 1,200 other paid admissions watching the Jackrabbits bounce the Chillicothe Paints 10-2. (Note: Next time you see State Sen. James Buck, be sure to mention how beautiful the venue he tried to block turned out to be. Politicians love to hear from their constituents.)

Bottom line, it was a picture-perfect holiday weekend.

And then, as things were winding down, I saw another number in Monday’s USA Today: 623,890.

623,890 Americans lost to war from WWI through May 17, 2016.

Numbers can be cold and clinical. They fail to fully express the flesh-and-blood human beings whose lives are summed up within the grand total.

To put this particular number into context, assume you could take the 300,000 who were at the parade, add roughly 322,000 of the 350,000 who were at the race, and then throw in the 33 racecar drivers, 12 WWII vets in Jeeps and another dozen “sailors,” and 1,200 paid admissions at the ballgame, put them all in the same place at the same time, and you would begin to have a rough visualization of the number of U.S. war dead since 1917.

This is a number that will inevitably increase with time. We are a nation with global interests, and global obligations. It would be irresponsibly naïve to suppose our global commitments can be met without the necessity of putting American men and women in harm’s way from time to time.

Most will come home. Some will come home in a flag draped coffin. Some will not come home at all.

Which brings us to the presidential election.

When Election Day comes around in November, Memorial Day, and the solemnity and revelry that surround it, will be five months in our collective rearview mirror. There will be many considerations affecting the nation’s ultimate choice, but one of the uppermost should be how the next president will perform as commander-in-chief of our military.

It’s not my purpose to shill for any specific candidate, only to argue that we should be looking for a president who can avoid extremes.

A leader who lives solely in a world of numbers might see our military as mathematical abstractions to be moved around the board of international relations without regard to the underlying human factor, readily available to be expended at the drop of a hat on questionable adventures.

A leader who dwells solely on the fact the military is made up of human beings, each with their own hopes and dreams, might hesitate to commit when commitment really is in our national interests.

We require a commander-in-chief who values our military men and women too highly to throw them on the scales of history needlessly, but who will not shy away from doing so when it becomes necessary.

There are 623,890 men and women, each with a life story cut short, who would expect us to make a wise choice, a choice we have only because of them.

The number will continue to rise.

Give it some serious thought.