Memorial Day: what kind of sacrifice?

It’s so hard to see Memorial Day. To me, I can never truly understand. Furthermore, I know I don’t want to truly understand, I don’t want to know that pain. But it never fails that every time I visit the “black wall” in D.C., every time I remember when I sat and watched soldiers guard a tomb of someone nobody knows, every time I go by my local town’s Memorial Bridge, I stop a moment and wonder.

More than that, I often see someone. Who knows who he or she is, a soldier of some lost war that I only know from books and newscasts. But when they get lost in their own world staring at a name, I stare at them. I stare deep into those eyes. I look past the smiles and the family that might be with them. I can see something in the black pupils deep inside.

Once, I saw the black granite in that pupil. I saw the wall reflected in an old man’s eyes. I saw the tears well up. I saw pain untold in the eyes of a man I’d never know.

The longer I sat at the wall, the deeper I fell into thoughts of what service was like, thoughts of what that kind of sacrifice is like. Whether it was a jungle or desert, charlie-in-the-trees or a line-in-the-sand, I couldn’t tell a difference in the black of the eyes. I have never seen that kind of pain in any others, but I never see anything different in a soldier’s eyes.

I thought long and hard that day about what it would be like to live that life. Your brother dies feet away from you, it doesn’t make sense. There is no reason in that moment of death.

But instead of focusing on that moment of death, my thoughts drifted towards his recent past. How did he live right before he died? In a tent? Barracks? Uncomfortable. On edge, High Alert. No A/C. Was he on patrol? When’s the last time he had a shower? Had a good night’s sleep? Maybe he had been on deployment for eight months, maybe longer. How long had it been since he had seen his parents? his wife? his brother? sister? When’s the last time he was home?

This guy has sacrificed so much more than just his death. He sacrificed life. Not ‘his’ life, but life in general. He sacrificed happiness as we might measure it. She sacrificed a chance for a “normal family.” They sacrificed hopes, future, dreams, plans… life. I know they gained comrades, love like I could never understand, but they lived on the extremes. He shared letters from home like he wasn’t scared to death that it’d be the last one he read. She said goodbye to her son on a satellite call like she wasn’t half-sure it would be the last time that voice drifted into her ears.

They lived in hell, breathed death, ate pain, drank adrenaline, and never got a chance to lay it down.

Because it was the last letter he read, it was the last call she made. There wasn’t a “next time” and they knew it.

Black granite and memorial bricks are never enough to fill the space, the space left in families. You can’t chisel enough marble to chip away at that kind of pain.

The more I thought about exactly what “kind” of sacrifice is the extent of the soldier, the more I realized that I can’t fathom the reason behind that. Loyalty only stretches so far these days. Who in their right mind would ever CHOOSE that life? What is wrong with these people that they would walk headlong into that?

It was that moment when something smacked me in the head. Not literally, but like that shiver down your spine that you can’t help but jerk from, something slid into my thoughts. Religious or not, there is a truth that no man could ever argue. An undeniable truth that cuts through the black pain in those pupils. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

I never knew I had so many friends in this world…