Originally posted May, 2026 on Substack
I went to visit an old friend the other day. (A whirlwind one day trip to DC). The older I get, the less I like visiting gravesites. It used to bring me comfort, to stand at my grandparents gravesite, to feel connected to people who loved me dearly, were part of history, my story.
Now I hate it. Hate that my friends who were full of life, quick with a laugh, and usually a s&!t-eating grin, friends who never stopped moving are now arrested under the grass at my feet, their bones in a heap next to me, and the world slightly worse off without them. Present but not present, not the sum of their souls. The contrast feels like an obscenity.
We’ve done this too many times.
After Arlington, I walked over to the Vietnam Wall and paid my respects to two others who were not my friends in this lifetime, but drove the trajectory of it in countless ways, men whose bodies and bones are still in the unknown, no gravesite to linger over, just names on black granite and stainless steel to force us to remember.
My father’s high school friend, Dr. Bobby Jones, an Air Force major, was a passenger in a two-seat F-4 Phantom jet that disappeared near Da Nang, in what was then South Vietnam, on Nov. 28, 1972. His remains were never recovered.
Bobby’s sister, Jo Ann Shirley, 25 when he was killed, eventually became the head of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia and a passionate advocate for the many men who remained missing or imprisoned in Vietnam after the war. My father remained close to the Jones family, and because Jo Ann’s work was pivotal in repatriating the remains of many soldiers previously unaccounted for, we had front row seats to many of their memorials.
I remember them in fragments now. Wooden pews and red velvet. The hushed solemnity of nondescript base chapels. Dust motes hovering in the light streaming through seldom-cleaned windows. The soaring tones of my father’s deep voice as he sang for these men, the fallen soldiers at their homecoming, long after their deaths in a fetid jungle. It stirred in my blood, already two centuries deep with soldiers and sacrifice. I was captivated by the men left behind. The ones in caskets, and the ones in the pews. There were so many veterans in wheelchairs, most with long hair and leather jackets covered in ragged patches. They were unfailingly kind to me, though most didn’t say much. I met homeless men with the stink of the unwashed and unwanted. I met senators with polished suits and slicked back hair, a lifetime apart from the former and yet unable to escape the common bonds forged in the humidity and horror of Vietnam. All of them a silent testament to the wreckage of war. All of them my heroes, demigods to me, with clay feet and broken hearts. I joined the military in large part to honor these men, these men never honored by their civilian peers.
And I made it my lifelong mission to remember.
I wear two stainless steel bracelets, one on each wrist. One bears the name of one of my best friends, 1LT Jaime Campbell, KIA in Tal Afar, Iraq, 07 January 2006, along with John 15:13. The engraving has almost rubbed away completely – I never take it off.
On the right wrist I wear the name of SSG Steven Heitman.
On March 13, 1968, SP5 Heitman, five crew members and 4 unidentified passengers of the 101st Airborne Division were aboard a UH-1 Huey on a logistics mission in Central Vietnam. About 3-5 miles from home, the helicopter was hit by enemy fire and was forced to land. All 10 persons exited the aircraft and split into two 5-man teams in an attempt to evade to friendly lines.
One five man team walked into Camp Evans at 2000 hours. An intensive search was initiated, but failed to reveal any trace of the aircraft or the 5 missing. On March 28, elements of the 1st Cavalry Division found 2 bodies in a shallow grave in the area of the crash site. The fates of the other 3 remained a mystery and the three were classified Missing in Action. To this day, they are still missing.
I never knew SSG Steven Heitman but I’ve worn his name on my wrist for almost two decades now. POW/MIA bracelets originated in 1970 from a student activist organization determined to help Americans remember prisoners of war. Worn continuously since the 1970s, each bracelet bears the name of a specific missing serviceman as a personal commitment to remember. The bands were initially made from donated copper or brass and later from aluminum. They were engraved with a specific serviceman’s rank, name, and loss or capture date. Americans wore them as a pledge: to continue wearing the bracelet until the serviceman named on it either came home alive or was accounted for. For those whose serviceman was never returned or accounted for, the bracelets continue to be worn today.
Today is a day of remembering the dead. But I believe with every ounce of my being that they live, and keep on living, if we each take part in the remembering.
To Andy, who didn’t die in combat, but the war killed you nonetheless … At Arlington, I was in a cemetery of warrior dead. You belong here, you do, with your brothers, the kind of people I believe you only truly ever felt at home with, but sometimes I think we should have sent you into the Tennessee wind.
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