It is titled Dear fellow veterans: Tell your war stories, it appears in today’s Washington Post, and was written by Clinton Romesha, a former Army Staff Sergeant who earned (one does not “win”) the Medal of Honor for his efforts defending Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan in 2009, in a battle where 50 US soldiers were able to hold off more than 300 attacking Taliban in a battle in which 8 US Servicemen died.
After the troops were evacuated, the site was destroyed with Hellfire Missiles.
This is piece that is almost impossible to summarize. The best I can do is to offer a few a selections, and a very few comments of my own.
How do you consecrate the memory of your fallen when the place where they lost their lives is off-limits, terrain to which you may never return?
Generally, soldiers don’t like to talk about their most painful experiences. Most combat veterans have shorthand, watered-down versions of what happened to us that we recite, politely and dutifully, when asked. The real stories are almost never shared.
That, Romesha argues, is part of the problem. We who were not there lack the full understanding.
We were given exhaustive training for the tasks set before us as soldiers. But when it came to coping with challenges after we came home, we were provided almost no resources.
This may have been the central insight — dimly realized and barely articulated — that led a group of us to conclude that if there were a path forward through the thickets of grief and loss, we would have to create it ourselves.
And that is how we decided we needed to tell our story.
By that he means not only the story of Combat Outpost Keating, but more:
The most vital component was building a testament to the men who did not come back. Who they were. How they died. And to the extent possible, measuring whether their deaths held meaning, given that their lives were sacrificed for an outpost that probably never should have been built.
As we reflect this Memorial Day, it is important that we hear the voices that too often we do not — those who have seen combat are often reluctant to talk to those of us who have not. It is too personal. It is too intense.
And yet, we need to hear.
Romesha, who has helped spearhead such an effort with respect to his own experience, and has seen the impact it has had, especially on the families of the soldiers lost at Combat Outpost Keating, offers this:
I have always thought of myself as a man whose actions meant far more than his words. But I’ve discovered that although stories cannot put what’s broken back together, the deceptively simple act of acknowledging brokenness — staring it in the face, doing one’s best to describe it unflinchingly and without embellishment — can create its own kind of cohesion.
By memorializing loss, we can begin to move in the direction of one day making things less broken.
I cannot, even with the excerpts I have offered, do justice to this piece.
Please, take the time.
Read it.
Ponder it.
Pass it on.
In memory not only of the 8 lost at Combat Outpost Keating, but for all we remember on this day.
Peace.