The Fallen of the Post-9/11 Generation: Memorial Day After GWOT

The first American servicemember killed in the post-9/11 wars was Master Sergeant Evander Earl Andrews, USAF. He died December 26, 2001, in a forklift accident at a forward operating base in the Persian Gulf. He was 36 years old. He left behind a wife and four children. He is buried in his hometown of Solon, Maine.

Andrews’s death was not in combat. He did not die in Afghanistan or Iraq. He died in an accident, in a service support role, at the very beginning of a 20-year period during which approximately 7,000 American servicemembers would die in the named operations of what came to be called the Global War on Terror — and during which a separate, longer, harder-to-count number of American post-9/11 veterans would die by suicide in the years after coming home.

The post-9/11 generation has its own Memorial Day arithmetic. It is not the arithmetic of any previous American war. It is the first Memorial Day arithmetic that has had to come to terms with what happens when the deaths from a war keep coming long after the war’s official end dates.

The named operations and their casualty totals

The Department of Defense maintains the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), which tracks American military deaths by named operation. The post-9/11 operations are, in chronological order of their beginning:

• Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) — Afghanistan and adjacent operating areas, October 2001 through December 2014. Approximately 2,350 U.S. military deaths.
• Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) — Iraq, March 2003 through August 2010. Approximately 4,400 U.S. military deaths.
• Operation New Dawn (OND) — Iraq, September 2010 through December 2011. Approximately 75 U.S. military deaths.
• Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) — Iraq, Syria, and adjacent areas against ISIS, since August 2014. Approximately 110 U.S. military deaths.
• Operation Freedom’s Sentinel (OFS) — Afghanistan, January 2015 through August 2021. Approximately 100 U.S. military deaths.

The figures above are rounded to the nearest 25 for clarity; the exact numbers are maintained by DCAS and updated as the casualty records are finalized. The combined total across the named operations is approximately 7,000 U.S. servicemember deaths over 20 years.

These numbers are smaller than the casualty counts of previous American wars. The Civil War killed an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 servicemembers on both sides. The Second World War killed approximately 405,000 American servicemembers. Vietnam killed approximately 58,000. The Korean War killed approximately 36,500. By those measures, the post-9/11 wars were the smallest American wars of the modern era in terms of in-theater military deaths.

This is not, by itself, the full Memorial Day arithmetic for the post-9/11 generation. The numbers above are the ones that fit cleanly into the categories the country has historically used for Memorial Day — deaths in named operations, with a confirmed casualty record. The harder numbers come next.

The names the public did not see

A feature of the post-9/11 wars, distinct from earlier American conflicts, is the relative invisibility of the casualty stream to most of the American public. From 1991 through April 2009, the Department of Defense maintained a policy — sometimes called the “Dover ban” — that prohibited media photography of the flag-draped transfer cases of fallen servicemembers arriving at Dover Air Force Base. The policy had originated around the Gulf War and persisted through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars until the Department of Defense revised it in February 2009 to allow photography with the permission of the deceased’s family.

Throughout the years the ban was in effect, the visual record of the post-9/11 fallen returning home was substantially smaller than the visual record from previous American wars. Vietnam was a televised war in part because the casualties were televised. Iraq and Afghanistan were not, in the same way, until very late. The cumulative effect on public Memorial Day awareness has been significant. Many Americans who lived through the entire post-9/11 era cannot name a single American servicemember killed in either war.

The names did, of course, exist. They were carried home, buried in cemeteries from Solon, Maine, to Twentynine Palms, California, and remembered by their units, their families, and the names-reading events organized at Marine Corps bases, Army installations, and veterans’ organizations. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the Defense Casualty Analysis System maintain the official records. Honor the Fallen at Military Times and the Travis Manion Foundation maintain public-facing names lists. But the names did not enter the broader American public memory at the level that, say, Vietnam’s did. The post-9/11 generation’s Memorial Day has been shaped, in part, by that absence.

The long tail — veteran suicide loss

The second number is the harder one, both to count and to place on Memorial Day.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs publishes an annual National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. Recent editions estimate that an average of approximately 17 to 18 American veterans die by suicide each day. The category includes veterans of all eras, not only the post-9/11 generation.

The most-cited academic estimate of post-9/11 service-connected suicide comes from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, which has estimated post-9/11 veteran and servicemember suicides in the range of roughly four times the in-service combat death count. The exact number is contested. The order of magnitude is not. The post-9/11 generation has lost more of its own to suicide, by current estimates, than to combat.

This is the harder Memorial Day question. By the formal federal definition — death in service, in a named operation, with a documented connection — these deaths do not appear on the standard Memorial Day casualty rolls. The veterans died after coming home, after leaving service, often years later. They are categorized for federal purposes as veteran deaths, not as in-service deaths. They are honored on Veterans Day. They are not, traditionally, honored on Memorial Day.

There is an active, ongoing argument across the post-9/11 veteran community about whether that line is the right one to draw. The argument has not resolved. Both positions have proponents. Both positions have honest grounds.

The two positions

The case for the traditional line: Memorial Day, by long-standing federal observance, honors deaths in service. Expanding the day to include post-service deaths — even ones that are causally connected to service — risks blurring the categorical distinction that makes Memorial Day what it is. If every veteran death over time becomes a Memorial Day death, the day eventually overlaps with Veterans Day. The categorical distinction matters in part because the families of the in-service dead have argued, sometimes for decades, that their loss has a specific shape and deserves a specific observance.

The case for an expanded line: the names from the named operations are, by this argument, an undercount of the actual American cost of the post-9/11 wars. The same toxic burn-pit exposures, the same traumatic brain injuries, the same operational tempo and the same combat-zone deployments that drove the in-service casualty list are causally connected to many of the post-service deaths that followed. To honor only the formal casualty figures, by this view, is to draw a line that the medical and combat record does not draw as cleanly as the federal observance does.

Both positions are held by Gold Star families, by post-9/11 veterans, and by veterans’ organizations. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, for example, runs a public observance each Memorial Day weekend that explicitly extends to post-service deaths by suicide. The American Legion and the VFW have generally remained closer to the traditional categorical line. Reasonable people, with real standing to weigh in, disagree.

This post does not propose to settle the argument. It only names that the argument exists, that it has not been resolved, and that any Memorial Day observance among the post-9/11 generation is now happening inside that unresolved tension.

What is recognizable about the generation’s Memorial Day

A few features of the post-9/11 generation’s Memorial Day are recognizable when you know what to look for.

The ceremonies are smaller. The number of in-service post-9/11 dead is smaller than the number from any major twentieth-century war; the ceremonies at the post-9/11 units’ home bases are correspondingly smaller. The families are tighter-knit. Soldiers and Marines from a single platoon that lost several to one IED strike in Helmand or Anbar are often still in regular contact a decade later. The platoon-level Memorial Day observance — a few dozen people in a backyard or at a small ceremony in a town nobody else has heard of — is now a recognizable pattern.

The names are still recent. The wars ended within the past five to fifteen years, depending on which one and which observer you ask. The families of the post-9/11 fallen are not yet, in most cases, the families of an old war. The parents and spouses are not elderly. The losses are still raw enough that the Memorial Day weekend for many of these families is closer to the first Memorial Day after the loss than to a generational ritual.

The technology of remembrance has changed. Vietnam-era Memorial Day observances did not include social media name-reading threads or the kind of crowdsourced names-and-faces archives now maintained online. The technology has made it possible for a family in one veteran community to participate in a Memorial Day name-reading organized by a family in another — and that pattern is now standard.

What it teaches a present-day reader

The post-9/11 generation will mark its dead on Memorial Day for the rest of the twenty-first century. As the wars recede in time, the in-service casualty count will not grow — the named operations are over or stable — but the post-service loss will continue, and the argument about how to count it will continue.

What this generation has done well is to refuse the invisibility that the Dover policy imposed for nearly two decades. The names are now public. The faces are now searchable. The platoon-level observances are now organized and recurring. The Gold Star families of the post-9/11 generation have organized themselves with the same care that the Gold Star families of every previous American war organized themselves with. That is the inherited skill from the country’s prior wars, and it has held.

What remains unresolved is the harder Memorial Day arithmetic — the question of which deaths the day was set aside for. That question will not be answered by an act of Congress. It will be answered, over time, by the cumulative choices of the families themselves about whose names they read aloud at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day, year after year, until the answer becomes a tradition.

Sources

• U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), Defense Manpower Data Center — dcas.dmdc.osd.mil.
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report — most recent edition.
• Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Costs of War project — service-connected suicide estimates.
• U.S. Department of Defense, policy on media photography of dignified transfer at Dover AFB — policy revision of February 2009.
• Honor the Fallen, Military Times — public names registry of post-9/11 American military deaths.
• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) — Memorial Day observance, public program documentation.
• Travis Manion Foundation — Character Does Matter program and names registry.
• Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) — official accounting of unaccounted-for American servicemembers.