“I remember seven months ago. I remember the laughter, the joy, the hell. Since then, I have learned what it has meant to have no sun,” I began. I read the words from the page in front of me. My hands curled around the sides of the podium and my knuckles turned white. I breathed deeply and held it for a second before exhaling and continuing.

“He'd made a comment about being there so his daughter wouldn't have to be. Sounds normal, right? Except he acknowledged that it was the same words spoken again for the thousandth time in the thousandth year of war. They’ve never rung true. We laughed, because what else could we do? We laughed, because it was his second time deployed. We all knew it was false hope. But it was the light at the end of the tunnel we clung to,” I said. It was hard to get the words out as I looked back and forth between my notes and the gathered people in front of me. Some were dressed in uniforms, some in civilian attire, and some dressed as the veterans from wars long since ended. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I let go of the podium and spoke as calmly as I could muster.

“That date, seven months ago, will forever live in my mind. It was exactly seven months ago to this day that we laughed. The very next day, I would be making the worst phone call I've ever made. After that call, I stood up and there was no sun. No warmth. No brightness. I marched to the airfield outside the phone tent right to the rear of a cargo plane. I had the watch over a box with a flag draped over it. I escorted that box across the ocean, along a highway, through a city, a narrow winding road into a grim site filled with other such boxes. And I will never forget what we did,” I gasped out as I felt my heart pound, my breath catch, and my tears begin to flow. I shook my head and told myself I had to finish, for him. 

“We performed the most crisply, most perfectly, and most coordinated work we had ever done. We knew he watched us as we saluted him and presented to his wife and daughter the flag that had covered him. It was then that I heard those words and truly believed that I knew them. That night we stayed up late, joked, and tried to laugh as he had taught us to laugh. We could not. But we tried for him. We redeployed with the cargo plane now so much emptier than before. Empty not merely because there was no box. Our deployment was over a week later,” I made sure to finish my sentence looking out to his daughter, standing as tall as she could in front of those she led. She looked like him, had his gravitas and his dignity. His deportment. I spoke these words for her as much as myself.

“Today, I believe that I do in fact know and understand those words and why we utter them. They are uttered not for the fallen, but for us. To give us a way to understand what we are feeling and that though it shall not end, we may yet come to terms with it. To you now I speak these words, in hopes that for you who have felt what I feel and those that have felt much deeper sorrow than I can fathom, we may yet feel the warmth again,” my voice caught in my throat and I cried. The tears now fell freely from my eyes and I felt all the better for them.

I concluded, “‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.’”