Writer’s note: This story first ran on May 25, 2020. But this week, as the nation prepares to honor our fallen service members, I found myself revisiting Gabe and Ashley’s wisdom, looking for strength to get through this heartbreaking holiday weekend. Their words ring as true this year as this did last year, evidence for the argument Gabe made that this holiday is actually a “constant Memorial Day” in the lives and hearts of millions of Americans.
It rained the night Drew flew out of Kandahar, but he didn’t know it. His body was packaged in a metal casket, draped with an American flag. After a short goodbye, I watched him disappear into the belly of a large, gray jet.
That’s what I think of when I think about Memorial Day. Ever since I left the Army in 2013, I’ve had doubts about this holiday and how we celebrate it as a country. But this last week has been especially hard. Maybe it’s the isolation of working from home, or maybe growing older has just put more space and time between me and my time in the military.
I served four years as a junior Army officer after graduating from college in 2009. As a brand new second lieutenant, I was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Squadron 10th Cavalry Regiment and deployed to Afghanistan for a year beginning in May 2011.
I first met Army Capt. Drew Russell when I arrived at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the fall of 2010. A first lieutenant then, Drew had been with the unit for some time and helped show me around. We became fast friends with another young lieutenant, Gabe Villegas. We all deployed together that following spring.
On Oct. 8, 2011, I was at our base in Kandahar City, listening on the military communications radio, when a pair of KIA’s and multiple wounded casualties were announced. There had been an insider attack. A soldier in the Afghan security forces — a local partner to our American cavalry unit — fired his rifle into a command post, killing two officers and wounding several other soldiers, before escaping into the night. The officers were Drew and Capt. Joshua Lawrence, another friend. The war in Afghanistan had finally brought me to tears, as it would many more times in the next nine years.
A small group of us watched, mourning, until Drew and Josh were airborne, then climbed into a pair of Black Hawk helicopters and flew back to Kandahar. Raindrops, the first I’d seen since deploying that May, bounced off the windshield. For a short moment, the ink-black skies had opened.
The next time I visited Drew was in the early summer of 2014. It didn’t rain, and a bright blue summer sky shined down on his gravesite in the Schoolcraft Township Cemetery in Vicksburg, Michigan, as I talked to my old friend. Again, I cried.
Red, white and blue flowers and small American flags surrounded a broad black headstone. Above his name there was a photograph, Drew wearing his black cavalry Stetson and cheesing that infectious smile that never seemed to fade. Cavalry swords were etched into the stone, along with his birthday — March 20, 1986. I never seem to remember when Drew was born and couldn’t forget the date on the right-side of the hash if I tried.
I raised a cold drink — a toast between friends — hoping he was lifting a canteen from Fiddler’s Green, the cavalrymen’s afterlife of lore. “Always in our hearts. Forever in our memories,” the last two lines of the inscription reads. I’ve gone back several times.
The flags and yellow ribbons I see now beside headstones in Salt Lake City remind me that I’m not alone, and that it would be selfish to ever think so. Maybe the last three-day-weekend of spring isn’t just a time to remember the fallen, but also to honor those who carry the memories of them every day of the year.
I reached out to Gabe this week, because he’s wiser than I am, and a little more grounded. “Ultimately,” he said, “I do think the intent is to make a direct link between a ‘day off’ for leisure and someone’s sacrifice in the defense of the Constitution that allows that day.”
A captain when he left the service, he was on the Black Hawk with me the night we sent Drew home. “We have an added burden of having escaped death and have also been intimately involved with a war death and the constant Memorial Day we might feel,” he added.
That sounded right to me. And it felt good to talk, to feel less alone. So I kept texting friends, like Capt. Ashley Russell-Grey (no relation to Drew), who served with me in Kandahar. She was also close with Josh.
Ashley, a West Point grad who spent more than eight years on active duty, said her military family — her father retired from the Army infantry after more than 20 years of service — raised her to feel kinship with service personnel who put their lives on the line for the country we all share. “Even if you didn’t serve yourself, there was that connection with somebody who had served.”
Now that she’s on the other side, she likes “that Americans are feeling that kinship and connection with me,” Ashley said. “And trying to honor the people that I’ve lost, and that you’ve lost, and that we’ve all cried over.”
This Memorial Day is going to be different. For all of us. As a community it will be harder to celebrate and and harder to remember together. Fewer parades, smaller barbecues and —hopefully — more phone calls and videos chats with people we love.
I plan on reading and hiking, with Jason Isbell in my headphones, singing his Americana classic, “Dress Blues,” which tells the story of a United States Marine Corps corporal’s memorial service:
Nobody here could forget you
You showed us what we had to lose
You never planned on the bombs in the sand
Or sleepin’ in your dress blues