One of my most unforgettable moments as a parent happened Memorial Day weekend in 2017, when we took our daughters to Washington, D.C., for their first visit to the capital. Our itinerary was packed: White House tour, stops at the Washington Monument, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the U.S. Capitol, among others. We ate crabcakes and enjoyed soft serve while soaking in the National Memorial Day Parade, gawking at the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally for POWs and MIAs, and marveling at the city’s patriotic pageantry.
But nothing stayed with me like the memorials to those who served and died in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. That’s where I felt most proud to be an American. And most heartbroken.
I wept as my eldest daughter, then 11, pressed her forehead to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, then reached up, tracing the etched names with her fingers as if reading braille, honoring lives lost long before she was born.
In the years since that trip — and after hundreds of conversations with North Texans, many of them recent college graduates — I’ve realized how few truly grasp what those memorials represent.
Raised by the almighty iPhone on a steady diet of social media gruel, too many twenty-somethings have been taught a version of American history that begins and ends with its worst sins: Native American removal campaigns. Slavery. Japanese internment. Jim Crow segregation. Those chapters must be ed, but if that’s the extent of their learning, we risk producing cynicism without context, protest without perspective.
What’s often missing is the story of how far we’ve come together. When threats have been aimed at us from distant shores, Americans of every background, belief, and birthplace stood up, served, and sacrificed. Many didn’t live to return home.
The men whose names my daughter traced along the surface of the black granite didn’t die for one race or religion or region; they died for all of us.
I first understood that lesson thanks to a book and a man I ired. One of the first books that truly gripped me was Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam, a harrowing real-life of a Marine sniper fighting the Viet Cong. I imagined crawling through a viper-filled, booby-trapped jungle with the same Remington 700 rifle I used to hunt deer. It felt terrifying.
My Uncle Frank, who served in Vietnam and retired from the U.S. Air Force, said fear wasn’t top of mind.
“You fought for one another,” he said. “Some of us weren’t coming home. But, together, we felt invincible. No one could beat us.”
That’s the spirit of shared dedication we honor on Memorial Day. And that’s what we’re in danger of forgetting. We owe those patriots more than gratitude. We owe them a deeper understanding of what this country has endured and overcome, instead of what it’s gotten wrong. We owe them a fuller version of our history, one that holds space for both the scars and the strides.
This Memorial Day, I’ll think back to that moment at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — my daughter’s small hands tracing the names of men who died decades before she was born. And I’ll what those names represent: legacy, not simply loss. America is something we build together or not at all. Their commitment was shared. Our future must be as well.