memorial day

In a past life, I used to be in the Air Force. I don't normally advertize that fact (notionally because I'd like to leave that chapter of my life well closed for a myriad of reasons), but sometimes, while I may give "Temu Jesus" vibes according to some close friends, and while I do everything in my power to leave that period of life in the past, there are a few times where I feel like it's worth taking a few minutes to remember some important people.

I think it's safe to say that for most veterans, Memorial Day is a little tough to say the least. I grew up in a military environment, and at least while I was a kid, Memorial Day tended to blur with Veteran's Day in my mind. The gang from my dad's work got together, be it on the beach, at a park, or in someone's yard, and everyone grilled burgers and hot dogs and drank shitty beer.

I didn't understand what we were celebrating, not truly, only that we were celebrating.

Fast forward a decade or two, and the memories of being the designated driver for a mass of drunk airmen have been all but replaced by those of being the drunk airman sitting in the back of a friend's car, hating that we could celebrate those we loved.

On days like today, years removed from those moments, those times of cheap alcohol shared with the closest family I think I'll ever have, I feel the need to return to that chapter of my life, to sit in that miasma of discomfort and recognize that I don't think I'd really understand how much I love the people around me had I not lost more than I care to count.

It's not often that I relish the idea of digging up those old memories, of claiming that past, but on days like today, I don't feel like I'm doing it for me. Hell, I'd even argue that it's not me who drives me to this place, but instead my lost friends, those to whom this day is dedicated.

I'm not a particularly spiritual man, I don't think, but I sometimes feel like on the dates on the calendar marked by tragedy or even the simple act of rememberance, my friends are closer than they normally are, and I hope they can hear me.

I hope they understand that, while the day is a sad one, morose in the broadest sense of the word, we celebrate them. I hope they know that the tears shed aren't just from loss, but also from the joy of having known them. I hope they know that while days like today are helpful in providing a moment of pause and rememberance, not a day goes by where they aren't on our minds.

I hope they understand that even on those days where their names fall just outside of arm's reach, they still inform our every action.

It feels trite to put it into words, but it's true.

Speaking from personal experience, the party line when you lose someone close to you while on active duty is that their death has to mean something. I vividly recall being told that "so-and-so would have wanted ____." Often, they would have wanted us to carry on, to keep working, to fight the good fight.

To say that sentiment is upsetting is an understatement.

My friends and I spoke at length about this at the time, about how infuriating it was to hear leadership put words in our dead friends' mouths in an attempt to get us back on track, to get us back on the grind.

It's not much easier to stomach, but I think I understand where they were coming from a little better now.

At the time, it felt like we were being told to forget our feelings, that our friends would have wanted us to carry on as if nothing had happened. Obviously that wasn't the point in the slightest. I'm definitely not here to defend military leadership or anything, but it's sometimes hard to remember that at the end of the day, these people are humans too, and while they had the same words and the same feelings we did, there was an institutional pressure to get back into things. The world doesn't stop turning for one man.

But fuck me, it should.

The worst part of it all, I think, is knowing that the apparatus that lead to those losses never really knew those people, never really cared about them. There's something to be said about how ruthlessly efficient the military industrial complex is when it comes to dealing with profound loss.

Rally the search party, ground the fleet, hold memorial services, get back to work.

Nobody would ever say it's good enough, but like I said, it was the going rate.

Without a doubt, there's a certain logic in returning to a norm when dealing with grief. I'm no expert, but while I've read enough books that talk about the importance of maintaining a sense of normalcy in trying times, I sometimes wonder in times like these if now is the time to sit in the grief that was taken from us in the moments relegated to normalcy.

In Jarhead, Anthony Swofford frames the narrative of the memoir around digging out his footlocker from the basement and sifting through it. I don't have the book in front of me right now, so I'm paraphrasing a bit, but he makes the point that we're meant to parse those memories and trauma, to make meaning of it all, but we can't. Instead, we end up pushing those feelings around, stacking them in the corners of a ruck which lives conveniently out of reach, all in the hopes that we're not faced with the task of retrieving them.

That exercise in stowing away those feelings, the relationships that were torn from us, the trauma of baring witness, it's something that doesn't ever feel easy in the moment, but the military makes you really good at it.

It's on days like these, though, that I feel like it's time to dust off that footlocker, to pull those memories out, not with the intent to reshuffle them away, but instead to sit with them, to relive them as much as I can bare.

At the risk of breaking whatever illusion of stoicism may exist between my words and you, dear reader, I want to talk briefly about the anger that comes with all of this.

While it's a mainstay in any good bit of military lit, I feel like it's misrepresented, or at the very least as though my feelings have never been really adequately rendered, so I'm going to see if I can't put some words down here that feel appropriate (and I apologize in advance if I go off the rails, I'm writing off the top of the dome, as per usual here).

During the rescue and recovery efforts just after a major disaster, every synapse in your brain seems to fire in sync. There is no time for rest, no effort more important than the one directly in front of you, namely to bring your family back home. As the rescue efforts drag on, first through hours, then days, you start to tell one another stories. You bank on the fact that your brother swam away from the wreckage and is chilling on a fishing boat, joking and smoking as he watches the combined efforts comb the waters looking for him.

All the while, an impotent rage builds, smouldering at first, stoked by every moment where your efforts feel like they're in vain.

After a few days of exhausting efforts, work you wished you'd never have to do, work you didn't even know you were capable of, your commander mentions that there's a meeting in the morning with the entire unit where updates will be shared. As one would expect, very little information goes out through unofficial channels, so you and your team are left to craft a narrative among one another as to what the news will be.

You raise a toast to your brother the night before, sure that you'll wake up to a selfie in the group chat of him chilling on an island beach near the site.

You know you're wrong, but it's what you need.

Morning comes, and it brings with it the worst possible news. His body was identified.

The dam breaks. Impotent rage mingles with profound grief in a torrent of emotion that you hope you'll never feel again.

And you don't; not really. You find yourself microdosing fury and grief whenever you see something that reminds you of him, of the situation: a helicopter flies overhead, you open a map on your computer, a young family passes by.

I don't know the truth of this, but I heard once that anger is a secondary emotion, that it comes as a result of a primary emotion like fear or sadness. Sometimes that makes sense, but I feel like it robs anger of what it is owed.

Microdosing grief feels weirdly appropriate, if only because you know it will slowly fade. The anger, though, doesn't seem to fade, at least not for me. Looking back on the day we got the news, sadness felt like the white gesso priming the canvas: the emotional background tinting every moment back then.

The anger, though, is vivid. Every memory seems painted with vibrant hues of rage and fury. It's the closest you've ever been to madness as you understand it, and every time you're reminded of those moments, it feels like that madness takes the place of the ink with which your story is written.

I'm not an angry man, but I know angry men, and in these moments, I feel like I understand them more closely than I ever have.

I don't think I have good words to wrap up this post. It feels too easy to say that I'm sad, that I'm angry, that I hold a hate in my heart which can only be understood by my siblings who also wear memorial bracelets.

It feels harder to say that, for some strange reason, all of that vitriol and grief seems to paint love with a vibrancy that I can only aspire to capture with words.

This is not an attempt to find meaning, to be clear. Those we've lost deserve infinitely more than we could possibly give them, and it feels almost selfish to settle a sense of meaning in their deaths.

There is no good end to this. I don't think it'll ever really end.

There's a part of me that thinks it shouldn't.

Until next time.

• Austyn