Mighty Hearts: Memorial Day 2025
In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
I published a version of this essay two years ago on Veterans’ Day. You’ll find an edited and updated version of it here today.
Veterans Day and Memorial Day always bleed together in my mind, and I suspect they do in the minds of others as well. I have wondered why this is the case. Veterans Day could be an uncomplicated celebration—uncomplicated by the remembrance of loss and of death that distinguishes Memorial Day. It could be a chest-thumping secular “all saints day” as opposed to the secular “all souls day” of Memorial Day with its cemetery visits and requiem masses.
But to my mind there is something somber in all remembrance of veterans. After all, there are veterans because there are wars. Veterans are the visible reminder of those problems for which we could find no solution other than killing the other side. It’s inevitable, and even appropriate, for a memento mori to accompany the lives of those whose work has involved close trading in the currency of human life.
The Marine Corps birthday ball, for example, occurs on November 10th, and is Marines’ biggest annual celebration. While Marines are the most mission-focused of the services and least prone to political or sentimental distractions, loss and remembrance mark every single birthday ball. At every ball you will find a table and place setting that remain shrouded, empty and apart. It is a table for the fallen.
The prevalence in the military of tattoos, patches, and unit logos featuring skulls, especially among those in the combat arms, seems right to me. It is an honest emblem for the guild of warriors. Bankers are rightly represented by the dollar sign. Warriors by the skull. For me, I think it is this aspect of being a veteran that diminishes the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day. What we note this weekend is the walking, talking, memento mori of our veterans.
Several years ago, shortly after leaving active duty myself, I was celebrating the Marine Corps Birthday with a couple Marine friends in my home. One of them was a Navy Corpsman who, as the evening wore on, told a story he had buried for a long time. It involved a great deal of futile effort to patch together dying people and subsequently filling many body bags. He had been in Iraq during some of the heaviest fighting and had more experience with this kind of thing than most. He had negotiated a truce with most of his memories, but then he described having to place a child in a body bag. The room was silent when he ended with tears in his eyes stating simply that “no one should have to bag a little kid.”
This year, our (the USA’s) direct involvement in war seems to be less than most of the years in my adult life. Perhaps there is new-found sobriety among our political elites regarding American lives—perhaps even regarding every life? That’s a lot to hope for, but I hope for it.
Even so, peace requires strength.
Sometimes what is lost in the discussion of the foolishness of the wars to which we have sacrificed our young is the beauty of that quality in the young that disposes them to undertake great adventures and to risk everything in them. There are few experiences as intense as the friendship and camaraderie among a rakish group of 18-24 year old kids who know they are playing for keeps with their very lives.
The pride and pleasure I take in having served a decade in the Marine Corps arises not because I take war lightly but because of something about the greatness of young souls and the adventure. These excerpts from a Memorial Day speech by the civil war veteran and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. strike a beautiful balance between the mourning and remembrance appropriate to losses we mark today, and the daring and passion of the young who sustained them.
But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
. . . [W]e have seen with our own eyes beyond and above the gold fields the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.
Such hearts—ah me, how many!—were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year—in the full tide of spring—at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life—there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.
. . . But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death—of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
The risk, the terror, the friendship, the loss, the adventure….To encounter these in our youth is strong medicine. So strong that for many it threatens to cast the rest of life in a kind of shadow. It is, as Holmes writes, a kind of fire, and outside the light of that fire the other goods of life might seem dim.
But against this is my prayer that those I served with, and many others, can take that fire with them and not simply live in the shadow it once cast. I pray that we can sustain those mighty hearts of our youth. Take that energy and enthusiasm, the strength and willingness to suffer, the friendship and camaraderie and allow it to illuminate and warm the rest of our lives.
Peace.
Beautiful and thoughtful description of how Memorial day should be remembered, and our servicemen respected. We are honored to celebrate you, Patrick, as our family’s prime example of dedicated military service. Keep the fire going!
Patrick. I'm a few days late but this was worth the wait. You captured beautifully so much of the feelings I find myself reminiscing about. It's both the futility and the grandeur of those days.
Thank you for writing this.