Remembering the fallen

Memorial Day and Veterans Day can often seem interchangeable. Both days are marked by solemn reflection on the service of military members. The main difference in my life has been usually that I got Memorial Day off, but never Veterans Day.  But really the difference couldn’t be starker. Simply put: on Veterans Day we celebrate the living, on Memorial Day we contemplate the dead. Specifically, we remember those who died while in military service.
For me, as a veteran of the U.S. Air Force (2000 – 2007), that means I usually end up thinking about my friends and colleagues who died. And by dumb luck, I never knew anyone who was killed in action despite my military years being mostly in a state of warfare. The first one of my fellow airmen to die was by his own hand. Joe drove out to a field not long after returning home from a deployment and shot himself. People said he’d been having trouble with a relationship, but he’d been overseas pulling the trigger for months. I’d been in the unit for less than a year. I was deployed in Afghanistan when the commander called us together to share the news. My squadron was pretty small, 160-odd people, so the loss hit everyone. A couple of years later there was another suicide in my unit. A sergeant shot himself in his home. We lost other people in accidents, a friend of mine in another squadron flew into the side of a mountain during a training exercise. There wasn’t a constant delivery of death notices, but they came frequently enough to remind us all of the hazards of what we were doing.
And all the while I was coming and going from the war zone, flying combat missions. We were taking lives, we were being shot at, we were under rocket attacks, suicide bombers blew themselves up at the gates of the base, but death never felt imminent to me, personally. The deaths of my friends and colleagues never really impacted me as a trend – each tragedy was encapsulated, it’s own terrible isolated incident.
But the suicides were of particular concern for the leadership. Our first sergeant, the highest ranking enlisted man in the squadron, told me years later that he felt bad for the lieutenant colonel who had taken over leadership of the unit shortly after the second suicide. I wouldn’t say there was a morale problem in our unit. We were one of the most deployed units in the Air Force. Sure, people griped, but we had a saying that ran along the lines of, “if the aircrew aren’t complaining, you should check for a pulse.”
Active duty suicide was enough of a concern for the Department of Defense that it began publishing the Suicide Event Report in 2008. There have been an average of 279 suicides per year among Active Duty service members across all branches each year since then, with a similar figure being reported for the Reserve and National Guard, despite the general decrease in overseas deployments. It’s about 19 people out of every 100,000 in service. By comparison, the national suicide rate as reported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is 12.93 per 100,000 Americans.
Memorial Day is supposed to be the day we take to think about those who lost their lives in military service to their country. Typically we envision the beaches at Normandy, men killed in Vietnam or the tragic loss of lives in IED attacks in Iraq or Afghanistan. But there are other lives being lost among the members of the military.
Memorial Day came about after the slaughter of Americans that occurred during the Civil War. The graves of Union and Confederate soldiers were decorated alike, whether they lay in northern or southern ground. In December 2000, the U.S. Congress passed The National Moment of Remembrance Act. The National Moment of Remembrance encourages all Americans to pause wherever they are at 3 p.m. local time on Memorial Day for a minute of silence to remember and honor those who died in service to the nation.
So on Memorial Day I encourage you to spend a moment to consider those who went all in, gave it everything they had, and didn’t make it out the other side. However they met their end, whether from the enemy or by becoming overwhelmed from within. I’ll be thinking about Joe, Gil and Dave as well as all the others who made their oaths to serve but aren’t with us today.
— Stuart Tiffen