Memorial Day asks something harder of us than gratitude.
Gratitude is easy. It can be said quickly, posted publicly, and forgotten before the grill cools. Remembrance is different. Remembrance has weight. It requires us to stop long enough to understand that the freedoms we treat as atmosphere were purchased by particular people, in particular wars, from particular families, at particular kitchen tables where an empty chair never stopped being empty.
I was raised in a United States Marine military family where Memorial Day was never the unofficial beginning of summer. It was not a sales weekend, a beach weekend, or a patriotic costume change. It was a day of quiet gravity. My father joined the Marines in World War II at fifteen years old and fought across the Pacific. He went on to serve through Korea and Vietnam. We were children in married officers’ quarters, growing up inside the rhythm of deployments, casualty notifications, folded flags, and the terrible silence that followed the knock on a door.
We had our own childhood ritual for fear. This was 1968-69, the height of the Vietnam killed in action. We called it the Passover.
Please Don’t Stop at my house
When the black government sedan turned into the neighborhood and slowed in front of the houses, time stopped. We stopped playing. Our mothers looked through curtains. Our Fathers already deployed were suddenly everywhere in our minds.
Every family prayed the sedan would not stop at their house. If it passed by, relief came immediately, followed almost at once by shame, because the car was going somewhere. It was stopping for somebody. Another family was about to be told that the man they loved was not coming home.
That is what Memorial Day meant before America learned to turn nearly every solemn occasion into a long weekend.
Irreconcilable Grief
The official history is clear. Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, was formalized in 1868 by General John A. Logan as a day to decorate the graves of those who died in service.
Today it will be next Monday, the 25th, the last Monday in May, and remains the nation’s foremost day to mourn and honor those who died while serving in the United States armed forces.
There is also a National Moment of Remembrance at 3 p.m. local time. That one minute matters, not because one minute is enough, but because one minute honestly observed is better than a whole weekend spent forgetting.
But Memorial Day also asks us to do something that is often overlooked. It asks us to care for the living who carry the dead.
That is the part I cannot separate from my own life. I served in uniform. I served in special operations and intelligence. I later went back to war as a journalist, trading weapons for cameras, which was not a fair trade. For almost fifty years, my adult life was spent either deployed to war zones, preparing for war, reporting on war, studying war, or helping deal with the consequences of war. I have seen what war does to bodies, to families, to marriages, to children, to faith, to memory, and to the quiet places inside men who are very good at pretending they are fine.
When they most certainly are not.
I have lost friends and comrades. I lost my own brother, Steve, a Ranger and Special Forces soldier who later became one of the most important veteran advocates in the country. He fought for Gulf War veterans, for those carrying post traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, invisible wounds, moral injury, and the accumulated burden of too many wars explained too poorly by people who rarely had to pay the price themselves. Steve was the ultimate battle buddy.
He knew the war does not always end when the soldier comes home.
That sentence should be written on every Memorial Day program in America.
The war does not always end when the soldier comes home:
Sometimes it follows him into his sleep.
Sometimes it sits quietly in the passenger seat.
Sometimes it shows up years later as anger, drinking, isolation, divorce, silence, or the inability to explain to a civilian world why a simple fireworks show can feel like incoming rounds.
Sometimes the living survivor carries a guilt the dead would never have wanted him to carry. Why him? Why not me?
Why did I come home when better men did not?
Those questions do not obey calendars.
So this Memorial Day, I am asking something specific. Do not reduce the day to an empty, automatic, ‘Thank you for your service.’ That phrase is not wrong, but it is often too easy. It can become a polite dismissal dressed as respect.
Say something more human. Say, ‘I was thinking about you today.’ Say, ‘I appreciate you.’ Say, ‘I know this weekend can be complicated.’ Say, ‘Do you want to grab coffee this week?’ Then stop talking and let the conversation go where it goes.
That phone call may matter more than you know.
Please take a moment and view the speech I gave, regarding our veterans, and suicide prevention, it drives my points home:
A veteran does not have to sound desperate to be in trouble. A friend does not have to say the word suicide to be signaling distress. Isolation is often quiet. Shame is quiet. Depression is quiet.
Survivor guilt is quiet.
The man who jokes the most may be doing it to keep the room from noticing he is bleeding internally. The woman who says she is fine may have spent years proving she can endure what no one should have had to endure alone.
If you are worried about someone, call. If they do not answer, call again. Send the text. Knock on the door. Ask the second question. Not ‘How are you?’ but ‘How are you really doing?’ Not as an interrogation. Not as therapy. As a battle buddy. As a citizen. As a human being.
Is a life worth a phone call?
That should not be a difficult question.
For veterans or families in crisis, help is available through the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, texting 838255, or using the online chat. You do not have to be enrolled in Department of Veterans Affairs health care to reach someone.
But before crisis systems are needed, friends and families can do something institutions often cannot do. They can notice. They can remember. They can remain connected.
America is divided today. Politically, culturally, spiritually, and generationally, we are not in an easy place. We argue about almost everything. But if there is one piece of ground that should still hold, it is this: the men and women who died in American uniform belong to all of us. Their families belong to all of us. Their memory does not belong to one party, one administration, one ideology, or one war narrative. It belongs to the country they served.
That includes those who came home from Korea to silence. It includes those who came home from Vietnam to contempt or indifference. It includes those who came home from the Gulf War and had to fight to prove they were sick. It includes the Iraq and Afghanistan generation, many of whom survived the battlefield only to discover that reintegration can be its own kind of war.
It is time to welcome everyone home. Fully. Finally. Without politics. Without judgment. Without pretending that a parade once a year repairs what war takes from people.
Memorial Day is not Veterans Day.
It is not Armed Forces Day.
It is the day we remember those who died in service to the nation.
But the best way to honor the dead is not only to decorate graves. It is to protect the living who still carry them. The widow. The son. The daughter. The battle buddy. The medic. The platoon sergeant. The interpreter. The correspondent. The Marine who survived the island. The Ranger who still sees the door. The Vietnam veteran who never got his welcome home. The young soldier who thinks nobody wants to hear what happened over there.
We should hear it. Or, when words do not come, we should simply sit beside them.
My father taught me that Memorial Day was not about death as much as duty. He would lower the flag and remind us to remember them not only because they died, but because they lived, and gave everything they had so others could live free.
That is still the assignment.
Remember the dead. Care for the living. Call your battle buddy. Welcome home those who were never properly welcomed. Teach your children why the flag is lowered. Pause at 3 p.m. Say the names. Visit the cemetery. Ask the older veteran about his friend. Ask the younger veteran how he is sleeping. Ask the spouse how she is carrying it all.
Do not make Memorial Day smaller than it is.
A nation that forgets its dead will eventually misunderstand the cost of its freedom.
Is a life worth a phone call?
A nation that forgets its veterans will eventually ask too much of too few, for too long, and then act surprised when the bill comes due.
This Memorial Day, let us do better than forgetting. Let us remember with discipline. Let us grieve with humility. Let us reach out with purpose. And let us renew the old promise that should never expire:
No one gets left behind.
Not on the battlefield.
Not at Arlington.
Not at home.
Veteran Support Resources - Share them in your community
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration - Memorial Day History
U.S. Department of War - Memorial Day and National Moment of Remembrance
Great post Ken and thanks for all your service.