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Blog No. 43 – May 29, 2026 This Memorial Day
Raising the First Flag on Iwo Jima by SSgt. Louis R. Lowery, USMC, who accompanied the patrol up the mountain, is the most widely circulated photograph of the first flag flown on Mt. Suribachi. Wikipedia, Public Domain
This Memorial Day I am writing to you because there are some things that everyone should bring to the foreground of their minds. It is at this time I find myself terribly concerned about not only the men themselves who served in the military for our World War II conflict (”conflict”? ha!), but about the words they chose to share describing how they felt facing battles, facing their “enemy,” about those voices who spoke the truths they sometimes chose to soften, and the ordinary times of their lives they chose to preserve in the midst of that war.
This Memorial Day let us not only remember those very brave military personnel who did not return, those who were fighting for our freedom, but those moments when the words of others, in the quiet moments of their lives, kept them writing, even when no one yet knew how their story would end.
This Memorial Day let us not pass it by as the typical kind of day that we’ve known up until now – hosting celebrations and parades along with American Flag observances. But the kind the letter writers lived with throughout the war when we were home sometimes, being a quiet, reflective, and uncertain people — when they did not, nor the addressees of their letters, know who would be returning from war.
This Memorial Day let us think of “remembrance” as not being about looking back in time. It was about holding on – holding on to whatever we had in our minds and in our hands at the time. Letters. The letter writers did not just write letters IN wartime — those letter writers’ letters carried each other THROUGH wartime and thereafter.
This Memorial Day what strikes me most is to think that they, the letter writers, were “already” remembering one another — even as they kept writing, even as they kept hoping. They just didn’t know it yet.
But, this Memorial Day, I must tell you, my friends, that as I was working with these letters, I believed they were doing more than telling a story. These letters, in their painful way, were reaching forward. They took on their own life, they shared the same words, they filtered truths, in their ordinary moments of the men’s lives — and, most obvious and most important of all, they carried something big, something beyond their own time: it was their voices that they carried, it was their voices that they did not want to be lost. Then, as their own life directed, those voices took their own direction and found their way to me.
And this Memorial Day, you must realize that still, life went on in the midst of it all. There were moments that seemed almost out of place for them when we look back at it now — like a post-competition golf game, laughter shared, because something normal reclaimed them for a little while. But do you know what? Those moments surely mattered and cannot be forgotten. And thank goodness, they will not, for they are written herein. Those letters easily remind us that these were not just soldiers. They were men, people, not statistics, as the typical history book would have you believe, but people who were holding tightly to who they had been before the war and who they hoped to be after it. They lived as strongly as ever, even as uncertainty surrounded them. They remembered each other, even as they kept moving forward. And I can see this now with certainty because these letters moved forward through time to me.
It is now this Memorial Day that I must make it known that it is a privilege, some eighty plus years later, to help carry those voices forward. These are voices that need to be cherished and saved, need to be kept so that they can be taught to the young, our future, who must know these voices came from people who were fighting for their freedom at all costs, including their final cost — voices whose words need to be read to the elderly who might even remember them and be reminded that what they did was not a lost cause, because many others will gladly follow in their footsteps if and when need be.
This Memorial Day, my friends, my book will not yet be appearing on the shelves of our bookstores or libraries, but know that The WWII Chain Letter Gang will be coming out soon, and it certainly was written by me to honor the 11 men whose voices and whose words traveled through WWII… across the seas, the land, and most importantly, across time to me to be shared with you.