I wrote this a long time ago, but I update it annually, and most years I send it around to my colleagues just before the holiday weekend. Trigger warning, this will cut very close to home for some of the audience here, but I trust that it will be received in the spirit in which it is offered: a heartfelt note of remembrance:
On Memorial Day
Years ago on my way to officer training as a 22-year old second lieutenant, freshly commissioned out of Army ROTC, I visited Washington, D.C., where I decided to spend a day at the west end of the Mall visiting memorials I was already familiar with. Standing in front of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall, I noticed something new that summer day. As I paused to read some of the names, none of whom I knew, there I was, my reflection in each name etched in black granite. It made quite an impact on me as I prepared to enter active military service. Those 58,256 names were people just like me—just like all of us, really.
The Wall is a somber memorial to Americans lost in an unpopular war. More than a decade after that visit, I learned a friend of mine had lost his 19-year old son to an IED in Iraq. Another young man lost in another controversial war. Having opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, I struggled to come to grips with his loss. I still do. Ten years ago, just before this holiday weekend, a dear friend's husband lost his battle with demons brought home from Fallujah, leaving his wife and two young children behind. I think of that in military parlance: died of wounds received.
My wife's great uncle Teddy never came home from the Pacific, literally; he rests at the Punch Bowl National Cemetery on Oahu. His was a popular war, and everywhere in this country, his service, and that of his WWII brethren, is celebrated for its contribution to the world. Not so for those fifty eight thousand names on the Wall. Not so for my friend's son who would have turned 39 just a few weeks ago. But the purpose of Memorial Day is not celebration, it is reflection and remembrance.
The Marine killed on some non-descript island in the Pacific differed very little from the Soldier killed in Vietnam, or the Marine killed in Baghdad or Kandahar. They weren't war mongers, or pathological killers, nor were they sainted crusaders off to do Good. Each was a person like you or me doing what our messy democracy—We the People—asked him or her to do; each with family and friends who loved them and now dearly miss them.
Overlooking the Wall from his own memorial is Abraham Lincoln, who sent more young men to die for our country than any President before or since. He famously spoke of our honored dead giving “the last full measure of devotion” to their country. So they did; each of them, whether preserving the Union at Gettysburg, toppling pathological tyrants on the beaches of Normandy, or absorbing a crude explosive in Haditha, Iraq; and so too, those without memorials, servicemembers lost keeping us safe during peace time. As Lincoln to this day reminds us, We the People sent them, whether you or I or the various historians liked or approved of it; we did it together, and they and their families bore that burden for us.
Lincoln—or more likely his secretary John Hay—also wrote of the “solemn pride” a mother must have felt “to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” The history of that letter is as messy as our democracy—a mess that doesn’t always make it easy to feel much pride. But channeling the words of Winston Churchill, another flawed defender of democracy, it’s better than the alternatives, and it’s still worth fighting for, so I pause this weekend to honor those who made that costly sacrifice for us, specifically: Private First Class Teddy Dulko, USMC, Specialist Tony Mauch, US Army, and Lance Corporal Chris Dyer, USMC.
Enjoy this Memorial Day and the beginning of summer—I surely will—but thank you for remembering what the holiday is for: our fellow Americans who left empty places at their families’ tables. Take just a moment to thank them for their sacrifice on our behalf and at our behest.
