The Day After

Not For Me

Memorial Day isn’t for me. I came home. It’s for the names — the ones who didn’t. The ones whose families spent today the way families spend it when there’s an empty chair at the table that was full last year, or ten years ago, or twenty.

People want veterans to say something profound on Memorial Day. I don’t have anything profound. What I have is a memory of specific people, doing specific things, in specific places that most Americans couldn’t find on a map.

And what I know — what every combat vet knows — is that the dead don’t get to weigh in on how the living remember them. They don’t get to correct the record. They don’t get to tell you what they actually believed, or what they were thinking that day, or whether they’d have signed up again.

So we owe them precision. We owe them the truth about what they did and what was asked of them. We owe them the work they were sent to do — finished, or at least kept faithful to.

The barbecues are fine. The flags are fine. The discount sales are obscene but not the point. The point is: the names are real. The chairs are still empty. And tomorrow we get up and do the work, because the alternative is that they died for a country that forgot what it was supposed to be.

That’s the tribute. Not the day.

The day after.

— Andy