It’s Enough to Make a Grown Man Cry

By Caroline Downey

Monday, May 27, 2024

 

As I waited to appear on a news network the other day, I watched the preceding segment with Florida congressman and former Special Forces sergeant Brian Mast. The lawmaker choked up as he recalled draping the American flag over the caskets of fallen soldiers whom he served with in Afghanistan. Mast survived stepping on an IED while clearing a path for the U.S. Army Rangers in Kandahar during Operation Enduring Freedom, but he lost his legs and now wears prosthetics.

 

Last week, Mast and some of his Republican colleagues took a day to scrub and wash the weathered marble of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.

 

“I couldn’t help but literally weep, I couldn’t help the tears from literally pouring down my face,” Mast said on-air. “I wasn’t in Vietnam myself. I was in Afghanistan. When we get around Memorial Day, I think about the sacrifice of friends that I’ve lost. Sometimes when I hear taps playing in the background . . . I’ve just heard it too many times.”

 

Though many veterans return from conflict with permanent physical and emotional wounds, a burning question in their minds, “Why wasn’t it me?” can sting more.

 

An Army captain in the Vietnam War, my late father rarely talked about his experience, but he intensely felt each Memorial Day. “No one hates war more than a soldier,” my father taught my brothers and me. He instilled the warrior ethos in us whenever he could.

 

Typically tough as nails, the man reserved more raw emotion for the annual televised National Memorial Day Concert. His curmudgeonly demeanor melted as he heard the swelling harmonies of the U.S. Army Chorus, the U.S. Navy Band Sea Chanters, and the U.S. Air Force Singing Sergeants. I’d turn to see tears streaming down his face, a rare sight. Like Mast, he was thinking about his West Point classmates who didn’t make it home. From my dad’s class of 1963, 20 graduates perished in Vietnam.

 

When we visited Washington, D.C., as a family, he insisted we visit the Vietnam Memorial so he could flip through the names of those who died in battle to see whom he’d recognize. For veterans of wars, there is a constant awareness that you were spared when others weren’t. The deep familial camaraderie in the armed forces is born out of the existential danger that service members face together and the commitment to country through it all. The U.S. military’s credo, “No man left behind,” is forever stamped on their hearts.