Memorial Day Hangover

This Memorial Day was a little rougher for me than usual. I don’t know if it’s because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the value of life even more or because I’ve become weary under the accumulated grief of lives lost over the years. Regardless, yesterday was just a sad, emotional day for me and I wanted to reach out. We don't heal in isolation.

This is an e-mail I wrote to friends and family after the death of a fellow platoon leader in Afghanistan. It puts words to the feelings I still grapple with nine years later. I am posting it because just as there is beauty come from sharing love, healing comes through sharing loss.

“Hey everyone, 

Two days before I switched out from being a platoon leader-essentially the last days that I will spend outside the wire for the rest of deployment, a Lieutenant who I worked with was killed. His platoon had briefly done security on a job site for us and was killed at another location my platoon had helped build.

I remember hearing an explosion off in the distance the night that it happened, but this being Afghanistan, you get used to hearing “booms” echoed throughout the night. Since nobody said anything about it the next day, I just assumed it was another SigAct that we would read about in the intel reports. It wasn’t until I was on Facebook a few days later and saw the Lieutenant’s name in one of my friend’s status updates with a link to an article about his death, that I realized he had been one of the casualties.

It’s strange here in Afghanistan. You hear explosions all the time, but after a while, you get used to them. Once you know that it didn’t involve one of your Soldiers or someone you know, it’s like the “All Clear” has been given. You relax again, relieved that, at least for now, you and the people you care about are safe. You move on. To the next task. To the next mission. Things, as much as they can be, go back to normal. But this time, I heard the explosion and even though I thought things were okay, they weren’t.

I suppose in a way this “going back to normal” is what we Soldiers are supposed to do. I know some people see it as a testament of strength. To never quit, to never give up, to move forward no matter what, but I can’t help but wish that everything *would* stop. If not to honor the Soldier, at least because in a split second, his family's world stopped and so ours should as well.

The entire injustice of it all, for lack of a better phrase shook me.

He was supposed to redeploy back to the States in less than a month.

He had a wife who had waited eleven months to see him.

He had done his duty.

He had served his time.

He was supposed to reap his reward of going home.

As Soldiers, we accept the risks that come with our job, and that’s fine; they’re our choices. It just sucks that our loved ones are ultimately the ones who bear the consequences of those choices."

If it resonates with you, please consider donating to Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, a veteran non-profit that holds annual grief camps for the children of fallen service members. I volunteered with them as a grief camp mentor three months before I transitioned out of the Army and it is still one of the most humbling, profound experiences of my time in the military.