General Mike Flynn on Memorial Day
- Dagny
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
There are 8 men and women I think about every Memorial Day. I have thought about them every Memorial Day for more years than I care to count. I do not say their names out loud anymore, not because I have forgotten a single one of them, but because the weight of what happened that morning settled into a place inside me that words have never been able to reach. I have learned over a lifetime in uniform that some things are not meant to be spoken into the air. They are meant to be carried, the way an entire Nation is meant to carry the memory of the sons and daughters who died so that the rest of us could keep breathing free air.
I had just taken command of a battalion of between 500 and 600 soldiers, and I was learning what every young commander learns when the responsibility is finally placed on his own shoulders. The uniform is a promise made to every mother and father who ever handed you their child and the rank is the weight of carrying that promise on the worst day of someone’s life. I thought I understood that when I pinned on the command, but later I would learn that I did not understand it at all.
My operations NCO walked into the command post that morning with a look on his face that I have seen too many times since and his voice carried the kind of quiet that you only hear when a man is about to deliver news that will rearrange the world. He told me a helicopter had gone down and in the space between his words and my next breath, I felt the floor of my life shift in a way it has never fully shifted back. I started walking up the road toward the smoke with my heart hammering against my ribs and my mind reaching for steadiness.
I came over the rise and what I saw was something I have spent the rest of my life trying to honor. There was no helicopter. There was a black patch burned into the earth in the rough outline of where the aircraft had come to rest and inside that outline there were small bumps. There were 8 and the world around me became a kind of silence I have never been able to describe to anyone who was not standing there with me. There was crackling metal and wind moving across the open ground and the soft scrape of boots behind me as more soldiers came up the rise to see. Beneath all of it there was a silence that I think only arrives when 8 American lives have just ended and the universe itself has not yet caught up with what it has lost.
I have spent 33 years in the uniform of this Nation and I have lost more friends than I will ever be able to talk about in one sitting. I have stood in living rooms next to chaplains while families I had never met learned that their world was ending. I have watched widows, mothers, and fathers find some hidden reserve of strength inside themselves and straighten their backs in the worst moment of their lives, because their loved one had given everything and they were going to be worthy of them in the giving. I have seen grandmothers fold flags into perfect triangles and hand them to grandchildren too young to understand what was being placed in their small hands. I have looked into eyes that had nothing left in them but love, grief, and a stubborn holy refusal to let the meaning of their sacrifice be lost.
The Founders understood something we are in danger of forgetting. We will not survive as a Republic if we forget it for very much longer. A free people is not sustained by habit and a free Country is not sustained by inheritance. Liberty is sustained only by sacrifice, freely offered and faithfully borne, by every generation that chooses to be worthy of the one that came before it. John Adams said the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people that it was wholly inadequate for any other. That truth has not changed in 250 years.
I am thinking of the farmer who fell at Concord with his musket still warm in his hands and of the boy from Pennsylvania who froze to death on guard at Valley Forge so that Washington’s army could live to fight one more morning. I am thinking of the brothers in blue who lay together in the wheat fields of Gettysburg. I am thinking of the sons of Irish and Italian and German immigrants who climbed out of the trenches at Belleau Wood believing that America was worth more than their own young lives. I am thinking of the Marines who waded ashore at Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and of the paratroopers who jumped into the darkness over Normandy with prayers on their lips and rosaries in their pockets. I am thinking of the men who held the line at the Chosin Reservoir in temperatures that froze the rifles in their hands and of the soldiers who bled into the elephant grass of the Ia Drang Valley and of the door gunners and corpsmen and pilots who never came home from a war their Country was too divided to thank them for. I am thinking of the Rangers who fought through the streets of Mogadishu to bring their brothers home. The Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen who gave their lives in Fallujah, Ramadi, the Korengal, and Helmand, in a generation of war that I watched up close and will never stop carrying.
I am thinking of the women who served alongside them and fell beside them whose names belong on every monument and in every prayer with the men they served with, because their sacrifice is no less holy and no less ours to honor.
I am thinking of the Gold Star mothers who are reading this with their child’s photograph on the table beside them, of the widows who still set out a place at Sunday dinner, and of the children who have grown up knowing their father or mother only through the stories of the men and women who served with them. I am thinking of the families who buried someone they loved more than their own life, who still rise every morning in a Country their loved one helped to keep free.
That is the American character at its most sacred and I want every American reading this to understand that you come from those people. Their blood is in the soil under your feet. Their courage is in the air you breathe. Their faith is woven through the founding documents you were raised to revere and their sacrifice is the only reason you have the right to read these words on a free press in a free Country with a free heart. Every one of them is part of the unbroken line.
Our heroes died for the God-given liberty of free men and women, governed by their own consent, under a Constitution written to restrain power and to protect the soul of a self-governing people. The fallen are not asking for our tears, nor would they want them if we offered them. They are asking for our fidelity. They are asking whether we will defend the Constitution they died protecting. They are asking whether we will raise our children to love God, to love their Country, and to understand that freedom is not free. They are asking whether we will stand watch over this Nation in peace as faithfully as they stood watch over it in war. They died believing that the rest of us would keep what they had paid for and the only honest question Memorial Day puts to any American is whether we are keeping it.
We owe them more than a long weekend and a flag in the yard. We owe them a Country worth dying for. That work does not happen in Washington. It happens in your town, in your home, in the quiet daily decisions of free Americans who understand that the warrior ethos does not end at the grave. It is handed down, generation to generation, and it now belongs to us.
Almighty God, we commend to Your mercy the souls of every American who has given the last full measure of devotion for this Nation. Comfort the families who carry their absence and strengthen the warriors who still stand the watch. By Your grace, make us worthy of the freedom they purchased for us and let no son or daughter of this Republic ever have died in vain.
So, this Memorial Day, stand up a little straighter, hold your children a little closer, love your Country a little louder and pray a little harder. Most importantly, resolve in your own heart that the watch they kept will not be dropped on your shift, because there is a long, glorious line of Americans behind you who paid in blood for the ground you stand on and there is a generation of Americans yet to be born who are counting on you to hand them the same Republic the fallen handed to you.
There are 8 men and women I think about every Memorial Day. I see them every time the flag goes up, I hear them every time taps are played, and I feel them every time I am tempted to believe that this fight for our Republic is too hard.
God bless our fallen, from Lexington to today, on every battlefield and in every grave, known and unknown, named and unnamed. God bless the families who still carry them. God bless the United States of America.
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