The Strange Luxury of Being Alive on Memorial Day

I’m off work today. My son Jack is off school. He’s in the other room, playing Minecraft, waxing poetic about Creepers, Ender Dragons, and other things I don’t understand.

My American flag leans in the corner of the foyer. The flagpole mount broke, and my attempt to fix it made things worse. I’ll be paying someone handier than me to sort it out this week. I feel a little bad it’s not flying today—but I suspect I’m the only one judging me for that.

For those of us who never served, it can be difficult to know how to best honor this holiday. In my younger days I’d have an annual rewatch of Saving Private Ryan, but since I became a father I set that aside.

I can’t text a soldier and thank them for their service. That’s the other holiday.

Then there’s the issue of war. They’re not all created equal. I have very strong feelings about war now, living here in the year 2025 and not 1942. Though my formative impressions were centered around my grandfather’s war—the one where he went to Europe to help keep the bombers flying over Hitler’s head—it seems obvious to me now that each American war since then became progressively more political and murkier in purpose.

But soldiers aren’t policies. They’re flesh, blood, and bone. They sign up not knowing where they might be sent, or who might be asking them to do god-knows-what. They swear oaths to the Constitution, a document whose meaning is endlessly debated. The choices of particular governments and particular wars are secondary to the reality that men and women offer up their lives and die, aren’t they?

But soldiers aren’t documents. They’re parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts. And those details take me beyond the politics, and even above my own sense of patriotism. I notice this whenever I listen to interviews by former German, Japanese, or Viet Cong soldiers, et al. They talk about the exact same things American soldiers talk about. It doesn’t take much to realize that all soldiers are subject to realities they can’t control. And yet, on behalf of those realities they’re often asked to make the ultimate sacrifice.

On Memorial Day, the tendency is to remember only the honorable. Which makes sense. Remembering the honorable gives meaning and purpose to the senseless nature of warfare. But the reasons soldiers die in war are vast, morally complicated, and often the result of nothing more than random chance.

But soldiers aren’t moral abstractions. They’re Timothys, and Jasons, and Nicoles. They’re individuals. They don’t all view the world the same. They don’t all vote the same. They don’t all believe the same things. The common bond between them is a choice to serve, regardless of the complications of the time they’re in.

I find the choice to serve an extraordinary one. It often runs through families, but not necessarily. Sometimes it’s simply a desperate decision to make a better life for themselves. There seems to be a certain sort of person whose mind naturally bends toward service, a sense of purpose—of calling—that asks something greater of them than their own comforts.

You should know I just had two packages dropped off on my doorstep by an Amazon delivery person.

As an American citizen, a lifetime resident of North Carolina, and a lover of history, it’s impossible not to notice that I’m living a wonderfully lucky life thus far. And because of that it’s impossible for me not to notice that these blessings I enjoy were purchased with untold and unknowable amounts of sacrifice, death, pain, and loss.

The American experience can be analyzed and intellectualized ad nauseum, but sometimes it’s necessary to force oneself to be reductive. For a moment, I need to set aside my feelings about the myriad complications to remember that there was a young person with a life, family, children, and friends who—

Took a bullet.
Crashed their plane.
Stepped on the wrong patch of grass.
Never opened their parachute.
Threw themselves on a grenade to protect their friends.

And they never came home.

I remember you, with a sadness and gratitude I can’t explain. I will do my best to honor your memory by living a life of peace.