Stop 'Remembering' And Start Loving

Memorial Day Is About Carrying Forward The One Principle That Binds Our Heroes

I’ve been sitting here trying to write a decent Memorial Day article for the past three hours. It’s been a struggle, a real struggle trying to rack my brain about what story to tell, what lesson to share, what inspiration to (hopefully)…well…inspire. And then I realized I was just trying too hard.

I was trying to make this an AWESOME article, one worth a thousand new followers (not literally), comments, shares, blah blah blah—all the stuff I generally don’t care about. But I wanted it to be representative of the importance of today. Then I remembered why I write. As I wrote in the introduction to my book, I don’t write for you. I write for me.

In writing this article about the fallen on this Memorial Day, I ultimately realized the larger theme shared amongst all the teammates I served with who gave their lives, and whose pictures I keep on my phone (I admit, there are more to add):

Not one of them cared about praise. Not one of them cared about awards or gave a damn about recognition or atta boy’s! What each one of them did care about, however, were the foundational principles that make this country great: honor, courage, commitment, duty, loyalty, democracy, sacrifice, freedom—all the principles that allow love of one’s country to transpire. And if you were to collect all these principles together and hang them up on the wall, the title or archway above them all would be labeled LOVE.

While every operator held slightly different motivations for serving, I know each one would say they LOVED what they did and who they worked with.

They loved the opportunity to have served with the most capable men on the plant.

They loved doing things Hollywood hasn’t thought of yet.

They loved being a part of an unknown history that will never be told.

They loved the brothers beside them.

They loved being Americans.

It is said that Memorial Day is a day of “remembrance,” a day to honor those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice for this country by “remembering” them and their actions. I’m not a fan of this term. Having to “remember” suggests that these men were, at some point, forgotten, and that’s never true. It’s not true for the families who wake up every day feeling a void in their hearts that will never be complete and it’s not true for the teammates who carried their teammates’ bodies or attempted to save them before they took their last breath.

Memorial Day isn’t about remembering. It’s about continuing to practice the same principles that allowed these men to live their best lives so you can live yours. That’s how you honor them, that’s how you keep them alive: by continuing to keep their ideals alive which are the same ideals that make this country great. I said in my book how if you want to kill an idea you have to kill everything with it. Well, the same is true for keeping an idea alive. You must continue practicing that idea day in and day out to give it legs.

Some people say that war is hell, that it’s ugly, that it’s the “worst of man.” But this belief is generally held by people who’ve never experienced war themselves. Can instances in war be ugly? Sure. But I wouldn’t characterize war itself as ugly because I can’t think of a single profession outside the battlefield where giving your life for the person next to you is the norm. The norm. That’s not the worst of man, that’s the best and most beautiful.

War is rooted in love. Love of country, love of the ideals that govern it, love for one’s teammates. There is no more beautiful act.

If you want to “remember” what these heroes sacrificed, practice the essence that drove them to their untimely deaths: love.

But (and here’s the dirty little secret) love isn’t just a feeling. You don’t just practice love when you feel like it or when it’s easy. Love is a skill, a willingness to extend oneself beyond oneself.

Anybody can love when they’re at a peak, when things are going well. I challenge you (and me, for that matter) to find love when you’re in the throes of battle with your spouse, parent, child, supervisor; when you’re angry, upset, pissed off, frustrated. That’s when you sharpen the saw of self and become a better human—a more capable human—than you were yesterday. Love and hate can’t co-exist.

It’s not easy. It takes someone willing to endure difficult emotions, a dampened ego, and hard truths. But this is what being a warrior is all about; it’s what these men were willing to sacrifice.

To remember is to repeat, so if you really want to remember America’s heroes, you can echo the same virtues they died for. That’s what it means to remember.