Memorial Day
 
I used to love Memorial Day.
 
It marked the beginning of summer for me as a kid. It was playoff time for all my baseball teams. It was often a prelude to a graduation.
 
But then I went to Vietnam, and after that, Memorial Day changed for me.
 
It became a day when the screams of the wounded were drowned out by the silence of the dead. It was a day when all those little flags snapping inlate spring breeze bore the faces of fellow soldiers who were forced to be men before their time, who were guilty of nothing more than loving something more than they loved their own lives, who died young; making us poorer for their passing but richer for their sacrifice.
 
Some of us owe our very lives to those who sacrificed their own. All of us owe more than we admit.
 
Today, they will be called "heroes" and heroes they are. But the tragic irony of our embrace of their sacrifice is that they are aknowledged for their heroism in death. Their lives are often forgotten even as their deaths are remembered. We didn't recognize them in life because they were often unrecognizable. They were us; relatives and neighbors, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, lovers and friends - who went about their lives just like we did. They dreamed and hoped and loved and wanted - just like we still do. They served and sacrificed and bled and died - unlike the majority of us. Their lives made them ordinary. Their deaths made them unforgettable.
 
Twice, after I'd been wounded, I was called upon to be the last living face a dying soldier would see. I remember the terror that burned like fire in their dying eyes and I chilled when I saw my own mortality reflected in their fading light. But I remember, too, the peace that calmed them just before they released their fragile hold on life. Twice more on the battlefield, I held the broken bodies of dying soldiers with the cyclonic rage of battle still churning around us. When you've done that; when you've seen life fading before your eyes; when you have felt the fear pass from their bodies into yours; when you've seen the peace replace that fear in the final seconds, you accept an implied responsibility to live as if living in honor of the dead. That responsibility calls on me, and just as verily on all of us, to live lives that recognize a debt to those gave that last full measure of devotion. I haven't always been a shining example of the best way to provide that recognition. I even come close to doing what I think I need to do to even the balance sheet for those who have died in combat. But I haven't ever stopped trying. I hope we can all take at least a brief moment on Memorial Day to remember what it is we honor about those no longer with us. They didn't become soldiers because they were "special." They became soldiers because they weren't. They became heroes because they recognized that some of the things they wanted to live for were also worth dying for.
 
Let's remember that we can still live for them and for what they believed in.
 
May they rest in peace and look down on us with a smile, knowing we remember in ways that will make them proud.