Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of the summer. Flags wave on front porches, barbecue smoke rises in backyards, and we enjoy a long weekend with the people we love.
Lost in all of that is the fact that it is a day of remembrance for those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country.
The Free Press invited a group of veterans to make a tribute to someone who never made it home. What we received were not just remembrances, but deeply personal portraits.
A lieutenant who bled out after pulling his wounded driver to safety under fire. A 22-year-old Army medic with a boxer’s stamina and a healer’s soul. A sailor who gave his life trying to keep his shipmates cool in a sweltering engine room. A woman who fought for her country overseas and then battled the bureaucracy back home for the sake of her fellow veterans—even as breast cancer took her life.
Some of these men and women died in combat. Others succumbed to the slow burn of war’s aftermath. All of them remembered on this Memorial Day by those who knew them best—not as statistics or symbols, but as unique, irreplaceable human beings who gave their lives for the protection of our own.
John Spencer on Army First Lieutenant David Bernstein
We arrived less than an hour after the ambush near Taza, in Northern Iraq. The firefight was over, but the air was still thick with smoke and urgency. As we rolled in, I saw soldiers walking out of the combat zone—shell-shocked, some crying. I asked what happened.
“It was 1LT Bernstein,” one of them said.
I didn’t need to ask more.
David had been leading from the front when enemy fire tore through his convoy. He was hit—femoral artery. Bleeding out. But even then, he crawled from the vehicle under fire to rescue his driver, PFC Sams, who was pinned and wounded. David freed him. He saved his life. And then he died.
I’d met David months earlier, back in Italy. I was a new lieutenant, trying to figure out how to lead a motorized infantry platoon into war. He had no reason to help me—but he did. He gave me his time, his playbook, his confidence. “We’re all figuring it out,” he said. That humility stuck with me.
David was a mentor. A quiet rock. One of those rare officers whose strength made everyone around him better. I never saw him again after our jump into Iraq—until that moment outside Taza in 2003, watching his soldiers walk out without him.
He died the way he lived: putting his men first.
I carry him with me still.
—Retired Major John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point
H.R. McMaster on Army Corporal Jeffrey A. Williams
Corporal Jeffrey A. Williams, of Warrenville, Illinois, served alongside me in our regimental headquarters security platoon during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He joined the Army days after graduating as an honors student from Wheaton Warrenville South High School. He enlisted as a medic because he cared deeply for his fellow man; his aspiration was to become a cardiologist or a surgeon.
Jeffrey was full of life and happiness. Specialist Josh Cruz remembered how Jeffrey “made you smile when you were having a bad day.” Sergeant Adrian Taylor described him as “without a doubt one of the funniest people I ever met, not to mention one of the quickest-tongued ever. He could make up a reason or excuse for anything in a second. . . but he had to make it funny. I love that kid.” Before every mission, Williams would tell his fellow troopers, “It’s time to go save the world.”
Jeffrey was also an incredible athlete and a champion boxer. On patrol on the narrow streets of Tal Afar, he was undaunted by the stifling heat of the Iraqi summer and the combined weight of his body armor, weapon, ammunition, and equipment and the medical aid bag he used to treat those wounded in battle. His physical stamina and strength combined with his irrepressible personality to give him an air of invincibility. He was a humanitarian, a courageous warrior, a selfless man who would do anything, including risk his own life, to help his fellow soldiers.
Like the effect of Patroclus’s loss on Achilles in The Iliad, Jeffrey Williams’ virtues intensified the blow of his loss on September 5, 2005, as our regiment initiated Operation Restoring Rights, a major operation to destroy al-Qaeda in Iraq. Jeffrey made the ultimate sacrifice in a battle to lift the pall of fear from the people of Tal Afar, defeat the forces of terrorism and hatred, and secure Iraq and our own nation from terrorists whose brutality knew no limits.
In a letter to President George W. Bush, the mayor of Tal Afar, Major General Najim Abed Abdullah al-Jabouri, wrote, “To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their sacrifice was not in vain. They are not dead but alive, and their souls are hovering around us every second of every minute.”
Today, I remember Jeffrey as one of the bravest of the Brave Rifles. I see in my mind’s eye his infectious smile. I pray for him, his family, his loved ones, and the fellow troopers he left behind. If you are passing through Warrenville, Illinois, please visit the Corporal Jeffrey Allen Williams Post Office on Rockwell Street.
—Retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, 71st Colonel, 3rd U.S. Cavalry
Elliot Ackerman on Marine Master Sergeant Eden Pearl
Master Sergeant Eden Pearl and I had decided to drive to Washington, D.C., together. Both of us would attend a funeral at Arlington for Captain Garrett “Tubes” Lawton. Eden was getting ready to go on deployment and I had just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan with the Marine Raiders, our special operations force, and Tubes had been our air officer. He was killed when his Humvee hit an IED on August 4, 2008. Our special operations team had pulled his body from the wreckage.
Eden and I packed our dress uniforms in the back of my car and headed north from Camp Lejeune. Eden was an intimidating figure—fair-skinned, tattooed, and standing well over six feet. He would’ve excelled as a Viking raider but had to settle for being a Marine Raider. He had been one of my instructors during training. He liked early morning workouts, and I recall him swinging a 60-pound kettlebell over his head with ease. He was the type of guy you’d want with you in a fight. His nickname in the Raiders was Mosh Pit.
We both shared a mentor, Major Douglas Zembiec, who like Eden had an outsize and ferocious reputation. In 2004, the LA Times dubbed Doug the “Lion of Fallujah.” Doug had been killed in Baghdad the year before leading Iraqi commandos for the CIA. On the drive up to D.C., Eden and I talked about Doug, Tubes, Eden’s young family, and his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. That night, we had dinner in Georgetown with my mother. Fearsome as he was, Eden charmed her as he talked about his daughter. The next day we put on our dress blues and buried Tubes.
Eden left on that deployment a few weeks later. The following August, almost a year to the day that Tubes was killed, Eden was mortally wounded when an IED struck his Humvee in Afghanistan.
—Marine Corps veteran and writer for The Atlantic Elliot Ackerman
Kayla Williams on Marine Captain Kate Hendricks Thomas
Marine Corps veteran Captain Kate Hendricks Thomas’s hospital bed was in her living room near the window. The sun slanted in as I sat beside her, wondering, “How do you comfort the person everyone else turned to for support?” She was always the brightest presence in the room, and even as breast cancer chewed its way through her, Kate continued to emanate a quiet warmth.
Sitting with her, I wanted to cry, scream, burn everything to the ground. Instead, I held her hand and tried to simply be present. Burning things wouldn’t help anyway—burn pits were what got her to this place to begin with. She was in Fallujah, Iraq, in early 2005—and just like when I’d been deployed as a soldier in 2003, the military burned everything, from plastic bags to human feces to lithium batteries, all doused with jet fuel.
But sitting still is hard, especially for women veterans like us, who are used to fighting. Having to struggle every step of the way made me hard and abrasive—yet somehow Kate managed to surround her inner toughness with layers of kindness and joy. Even when giving tough feedback, it was clear that she did so with good intent. Every moment I spent with her, she exuded love.
We didn’t serve together in the military, but instead in the ongoing fight here at home to secure equal treatment for women in the military and full benefits and support for all veterans. Battling the enemies of bureaucracy and indifference has no clear rules of engagement or chain of command. We were on our own. As a PhD and brilliant communicator, she brought both data and anecdotes to the fight, publishing books and appearing on panels to convince politicians and the public to change policies and programs supporting troops and veterans.
All the jokes about crayon-eating Marines fall apart when I think of Kate—though I’m sure she’d laugh at them.
A Veterans Affairs provider urged Kate to get a mammogram at just 38 years old—and found stage 4 breast cancer. I have three other women veteran friends, all of whom deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, who were diagnosed with breast cancer in their 30s. Aside from her wonderful son, one of Kate’s most significant legacies is the legislation passed in her honor, ensuring other women veterans can get mammograms younger than is typically recommended.
Kate’s death left a hole I can only try to fill by imperfectly showing others the grace that she effortlessly extended to me.
—Former Arabic interpreter Kayla M. Williams, author of Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army
Trent Reedy on Army Sergeant Seth Garceau
I served with Sergeant Seth Garceau in the Iowa Army National Guard in the early 2000s. I was a combat engineer, working with weapons and explosives. Garceau operated large trucks, bulldozers, and backhoes.
One summer, our two-week annual training was conducted in Fort Riley, Kansas, after which I was ordered to drive an ancient and enormous five-ton truck, upon which I’d barely trained, almost 500 miles back to our armory in Iowa. I was extraordinarily anxious about this. It was one thing to drive the truck slowly, in the woods on the base, but to operate at highway speeds through heavy civilian traffic was to risk all kinds of problems.
Then Garceau swung into the cab as my co-driver. He could tell I was upset, but he told me not to worry. He could drive anything, and he’d help me when it was my turn. He flashed his trademark “aw, shucks” smile, and I relaxed. We drove that truck back to Iowa through the summer heat. He was a good guy to talk to. When I complained about a “FUBAR” situation, he’d mention a time his guys had to extract some big machinery that had been stuck deep in the mud, mentioning the difficulty but highlighting the triumph of success, and laughing the whole time. He acknowledged the regular frustrations of the Army, but he had a remarkable gift for maintaining optimism.
Later, my platoon shipped off to Afghanistan. His platoon went to Iraq. By spring of 2005, I was late in my tour and excited to go home. On March 4, we received the news. Seth Garceau wasn’t going home. His vehicle had struck an IED. He’d held on for five days, but had finally let go.
Soldiers don’t always get along, but everybody liked Garceau. He was a friendly, hopeful, hardworking, all-American soldier. Every year on March 4 and Memorial Day my fellow soldiers and I post on social media to honor him. He was only 22, his life cut far too short, so much potential stolen. In the years since then, I’ve tried to remember his positive outlook, and I do my best to live a life worthy of his sacrifice. His time was taken, so it falls to us to cherish the gift of ours. Now, in 2025, he’s 20 years gone. But we will always remember him.
—Trent Reedy, former combat engineer for the Iowa National Guard
James Stavridis on Petty Officer Daniel M. Jones
Navy Petty Officer Dan Jones died by electrocution on August 21, 1990, on board the guided missile cruiser USS Antietam. I was second-in-command of the ship, and we were forward-deployed to the northern part of the Arabian Gulf as part of the response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
Dan was a young electrician’s mate. He stood out with his lanky stature, infectious smile, exceptional work ethic, and total enthusiasm for the Navy and life at sea. Everyone in the 400-man crew knew and liked him, not least because was endlessly ready to pitch in on every work detail—a perfect shipmate. He was the kind of sailor who would show up at the drop of a hat to help everyone pull supplies on board the ship, even though it wasn’t his responsibility.
We were all on high alert and knew real combat was coming in a matter of days. Dan personified the intense energy and keyed-up readiness of the crew. He was down in the engine room trying to restore ventilation to one of the crew berthing areas—crucial in the roasting 120-degree days of summer in the Arabian Gulf.
Over the ship’s announcing system, I heard “Medical emergency, engine room, Corpsman report on the double.” When I arrived seconds later, Dan was unconscious, and our Hospital Corpsman was performing CPR on him. He had clearly been trying to solve the electrical problem that was causing a failure of ventilation to the berthing compartments, when he was accidentally electrocuted.
Dan never responded. As he lay on the grates of the ship, looking like he was simply asleep, I turned to the ship’s Master-at-Arms and said, “He’s gone, Senior Chief. This war has started.” He was 19 years old.
Dan was only the second casualty of the nearly 300 killed in the operation, average age 26 years old. Today, I remember him as the first sailor who died in a combat zone on one of my ships. He was far from the last, but he stands out in my memory of those forever wars, and always will. Sail proud, Sailor, and RIP.
—Retired Navy Admiral and Carlyle Group partner James Stavridis
For more on Memorial Day, read Elliot Ackerman’s latest essay:
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Thank you, Free Press, for this Memorial Day tribute. Nickel, and a slow salute...
Heartbreaking tributes to heartbreaking sacrifices. Each one is beautifully written. Thank you, Free Press.