A Mortarman’s Memorial Day: A Veteran’s Reflection

The mortar tubes I trained on were 60mm and 81mm. The 60 you carried on your back in a soft case. The 81 came apart into three loads — base plate, bipod, tube — and you split them between three people. The tubes were not heavy individually; what made them heavy was that you were also carrying everything else.

This is Memorial Day morning. The flag outside is at half-staff. It will go to full-staff at noon. The U.S. Flag Code asks for both halves of that protocol on this day — the half-staff for the dead, the full-staff for the resolve of the living to keep doing the work the dead cannot finish.

The dead in my case are not many. I was an indirect-fire infantryman — an 11C in the post-9/11 Army — and the mortar section is not where most of the names in my service generation came from. Most of the dead I carry are from the rifle squads and the support assets we worked alongside. Some are from my own unit. Some are from units I never operated with, whose names entered my world later, through the small networks the post-9/11 generation built after we came home.

The country built Memorial Day for the act of remembering specific people. This post is my attempt to do that honestly — which, as it turns out, begins with a decision about names.

The ones I carry

I am not going to write their names on this page. That is a deliberate decision, and I will say why.

The names belong to specific people, and they belong as much to those people’s families as they do to me. A family’s loss is theirs to make public or to keep. Some of the families I am thinking of this morning have spoken their soldier’s name into the public record many times over; some have not, and it is not my place to do it for them. Naming a fallen friend in a published post is a heavier thing than it looks, and I have decided that the respectful version of this post does not do it.

So I will describe them instead. They were, on the whole, young — privates and specialists and young sergeants, the ranks that do the most of the dying in any war. They came from towns about the size of the town I came from. They had the ordinary plans that soldiers have: a year left on a contract, a wedding, a child, a trade to learn afterward. The plans did not happen. That is the entire content of the loss, and it does not require a name to be understood. It requires only that someone, on this day, refuse to let it become an abstraction.

I know the names. I do not need them written down to carry them, and I have carried them long enough to know that they do not get lighter. The decision not to print them is not a decision to keep them quiet. It is the opposite. It is a decision to hold them the way the families would want them held — carefully, and without putting them on display.

What it has cost to carry these names

The thing nobody tells you about carrying names is that the work is not even. Some years the names are quiet. They are in you, and you go about your business, and the dead are dead and you are alive and the country has Memorial Day and you observe it the way the country tells you to.

Other years the names are loud. Something triggers them — a smell, a photograph, a sentence somebody else says, a piece of equipment seen in a hardware store that looks like a piece of equipment you used to carry — and the dead are no longer in the background of the day. They are in the foreground.

I have learned, over the years I have been out of uniform, that the Memorial Days when the names are loud are the ones that do the most work. The quiet years are easier. They are not the years the day is for. The day is for the years the names come up out of the ground and demand attention.

This is the cost. It is not a complaint. It is the price of the bargain the volunteer military makes — that you carry the people you served alongside, that you carry the ones who did not come home, and that the carrying does not end when you take off the uniform.

What it means to write this in public

I have written nine posts in this series in the third person, in editorial voice — on the long weekend and what it is for, on the origins of Decoration Day, on the symbols and the observances, on the Gold Star families, on the architecture of remembrance the country built and maintains. That architecture is real. It works. The country built it carefully and maintains it carefully.

This post is the one piece of the series that is not architecture. It is a single mortarman on a single Memorial Day morning, accounting for names that mean something to him, and to a small number of other people who knew the same people, and to the families.

I am writing it in public because the work of remembering is not supposed to be private. The country set aside a federal observance for this work, and the observance was made on the assumption that millions of Americans would do, in their own small way, the same thing I am doing here. Most will not write any of it down. Most will hold the names quietly, to themselves or to one other person, and then go on with their day. That is also fine. The country does not require that the work be public to be real.

What I want is for the names not to disappear. The post-9/11 generation has fewer in-service dead than any major American war of the last hundred years — by the numbers I worked through earlier in this series. That is a mercy, and it is also a vulnerability. Fewer names is easier to forget. The Vietnam generation did not have to fight as hard to keep its dead in the country’s memory, because the cost of that war was inescapable to a generation that watched it on television. The post-9/11 wars were not televised in the same way. For nearly two decades, policy kept the casualty stream substantially out of the daily news. Most Americans cannot, today, name a single American servicemember killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Closing that gap is work the families and the veterans of my generation will be doing, one person at a time, for as long as we are alive to do it.

What I want for the country on the day after Memorial Day

I want the weight to stay.

The long weekend ends on Monday night. Tuesday morning, the country goes back to work. The half-staff flags have long since come up to full-staff. The cookouts are over. The cemeteries empty out. The Old Guard goes back to its regular duties at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — the same duties the unit performs every day of the year, but without the public attention.

What I want is for the weight of the day to carry into Tuesday. Not the ceremony. Not the rhetoric. The plain weight — the awareness that the country has dead it has not finished honoring, that the architecture of remembrance is built but never finished, and that the work of carrying names is the work of a lifetime and not the work of a long weekend.

This series will stay archived on the site after Memorial Day. The nine posts that came before this one will still be there to be read in October, or in March, or in the second week of next May. The Memorial Day work is supposed to be visible in late May — but the architecture the country built does not stop existing on May 26. Arlington is open all year. The Tomb is guarded every minute of every day. The flag protocol is in force on every federal holiday. The Gold Star families are Gold Star families in November and in February and in August.

The day is one day. The work is every day.

What I will do at three o’clock

At 3:00 p.m. local time today, I am going to stop for one minute, in whatever room I am in. I am going to say the names — the ones I did not write on this page — out loud, once each. I am not going to make a video of it. I am not going to post a photograph of it. The country asked for a minute, in the year 2000, by an act of Congress that carries no enforcement and no expectation of public performance. The minute is its own ceremony.

Then I am going to go on with my day, in the way Memorial Day allows. There will be a cookout somewhere later. There will be people I love around. The flag outside will be at full-staff by then.

The weekend will end. The names will stay.

That is the work.

Sources

• U.S. Flag Code, 4 U.S. Code §7(m) — Memorial Day half-staff and full-staff protocol.
• National Moment of Remembrance Act of 2000, Public Law 106-579 — the 3:00 p.m. local-time observance.
• This post is the first-person capstone of the Memorial Day 2026 series. For the documented institutional record behind it, see Days 1 through 9, available at the blog index.