How Do We Best Honor Them?

I am always honored and humbled by invitations to speak at Memorial Day commemorations, so I accepted two of them this year, one on Sunday and one today.

My wife, Kelli, enjoys Memorial Day events whether or not I am speaking, but a couple of the very few ways in which I get on her nerves are centered around those Memorial Days when I do speak, which is pretty much every year now. First, she is not fond of the grumpy period I go through each spring as I starve, run, repeat for a couple of months so I can fit comfortably into the Marine Corps dress blue uniform that was fitted for me in 1990. This year, I was injured during my usual starve/run window, and Kelli discovered that a husband who is ready to commit murder for a donut is more fun than an injured husband.

Kelli is also not fond of my habit of writing my Memorial Day speeches—and, indeed, all my speeches—in the hours and minutes before I give them. This year, I promised her, would be different. We would be on vacation in the Washington, DC, area for the ten days prior to the first speech, so I would get all of my speech writing done well in advance. There was no way I’d be writing a speech on our flights home on Saturday. That would be insane.

The venue for the Sunday event was a small Lutheran church out on the prairie near Washburn, North Dakota. We arrived a couple of minutes late, and that was entirely Kelli’s fault. She does not like gravel roads like the one that led most directly to the church, so she took a detour when that road intersected with a paved road. Unfortunately, there was no secret freeway to the Little Lutheran Church on the Prairie to be found in that direction, so we ended up on two even worse gravel roads and then a final section of the road from which we had detoured. It was not the route I would have taken, but I couldn’t drive. I had a speech to write.

There is an advantage to my last-minute speech-writing method that was pointed out to me at a civic event in Minot, ND. At the end of the event, an older couple approached me and said that they had attended two of my Memorial Day speeches and thought they were the best ones they had ever heard. The woman said that she liked how those speeches were about something. They weren’t just Memorial Day history and bunch of tired platitudes. Curious, I asked, “What did you like best about them, and what were they about for you?” The husband replied, “What I liked best was that they were about five minutes long.”

One cannot write a long, boring speech on the day of an event, though I’m sure some would say I have proved that it is entirely possible to write a short, boring speech in the minutes before it is delivered.

Another advantage of freewriting a speech on the fly is that your themes naturally emerge in an unvarnished way.

In the first Memorial Day speech that Minot couple had heard, I began with the story of a phone call from my teenage daughter on a bright, cold day in January. My youngest child, Francesca, was calling from Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor. She believed her death was imminent. In the background, I could hear the civil defense warning tone followed by a voice warning: “Ballistic missile inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

That phone call was a gift, I told the audience. When my daughter believed she was about to die, her first thought was to call her father. I went on to imagine what those who had been lost in service to our country might tell us if we could have one last phone call with them. They might tell us to get our noses out of our phones and pay attention. They might tell us to start having real conversations instead of shouting past one another.

The following Memorial Day, I began with the story of Lieutenant Michael McGreevy, a Navy SEAL who had been one of my midshipmen when I was a company officer at the Naval Academy. He was killed in Afghanistan when the helicopter he rode in was hit by a Rocket-propelled grenade.

I then transitioned to the story, from 1 Kings, Chapter 19, of the prophet Elijah hiding in a mountain cave and waiting for God. There comes a strong wind that breaks the rocks, but God is not in the wind. After the wind, an earthquake, but God is not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, an all-consuming fire, but God is not in the fire. Then there comes a still, small voice, and Elijah emerges from the cave.

I encouraged the audience that day to ignore the strident voices that inspire outrage and seek to drive us apart, and instead listen for that still small voice, the voice of our better angels.

Looking at those speeches, I realized that they did have a unifying theme. That theme was my answer to a question a reporter once asked me after a Memorial Day ceremony: “How do we best honor those who have given their lives for our country?”

We best honor them by making sure that the United States of America always remains a nation worthy of their sacrifice. That begins with being better citizens and better neighbors. We need to stay informed and engaged, even when it is exhausting, but also not be too hard on ourselves or others.

In the Gospel of Luke, an expert in the law asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus answers with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. After he finishes the story of the man beaten and robbed on the road to Jericho and finally saved by the Good Samaritan, Jesus asks the expert in the law which person in the story was the man’s neighbor.

“The one who showed him mercy,” answers the expert, and Jesus tells him to go and do likewise.

Blessed are the merciful, for they are better citizens, better neighbors, and better people.

I recently attended a presentation titled, “How Much is Enough?” The more I have thought about that question, the more I have come to believe that knowing how much is enough is another piece of good citizenship. Disparities in wealth and income have become more pronounced over time, and there are plenty of people in the world who will always be hungry for more wealth and more power and careless about who gets hurt as they hoard more of it. We cannot counter them if we don’t think about and define what is enough for us. Otherwise, it will always feel like enough is something just out of reach, and we will get stuck in comparison instead of companionship.

When my daughter thought she was about to die, a conversation with her father was enough. Her expensive iPhone mattered only as a tool to have that conversation. She coveted nothing else.

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I hope this Memorial Day weekend has restored your energy for what is required of us as citizens. I believe that together, we are enough, and I am again reaffirming my oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. I will do my best to be generous and merciful to myself and others.

That doesn’t mean I will be giving bad behavior or bad ideas a free pass. There is no end to those things, and they should be called out. They should be criticized. Sometimes, they deserve to be mocked, mercilessly.