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With Memorial Day approaching, I thought that over the next couple of days, I would share speeches that I gave at commemorations in 2022 and 2023. There is nothing political in these speeches unless you consider calls for civility to be partisan. They were given from the perspective of a veteran, a father, a teacher, and someone whose children are continuing the tradition of service that I began. They were given from the perspective of someone who understands that patriotism requires all to sacrifice some and some to sacrifice all. 
Just past noon on the 13th of January, 2018, I was running errands in Minot, North Dakota, when I received a phone call that burned the details of that bright, cold Saturday afternoon into my memory forever. The call was from my youngest child, my fifteen-year-old daughter, who was living in Navy housing on Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. She was sobbing on the phone. She kept saying that she missed me and she loved me. She said that I meant so much to her and that she appreciated everything I had done for her. She said she was calling to say goodbye.  
Moments earlier, she had been startled awake by the harsh tone of a civil defense warning on her phone and a message: “Ballistic Missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” An alert message on her television said that a missile may impact land or sea within minutes and that those who were indoors should remain there and stay well away from windows.
“It can’t be true,” I told her. “It can’t be true.” Those words were as much a prayer as they were fatherly reassurance because geopolitical saber-rattling at the time made it seem at least somewhat plausible that the paranoid and power-hungry dictator in North Korea had indeed just launched a nuclear missile at Hawaii, and the possibility of a false warning was practically incomprehensible.  
Still, I insisted that it couldn’t be true. This was not the natural order of things. My teenage daughter could not be in harm’s way because so many of us had gone there for her. It couldn’t be true because so many had served and sacrificed everything in the hope that their’s might be the last generation of Americans to know the devastation of war. I explained to my daughter that it couldn’t be true because the whole world knew the consequences of such an attack upon the United States. Those we honor here today have shown them.
There is no doubt that had that missile alert not been a false alarm—if even a failed nuclear missile had been launched at Hawaii—it would have marked the end of that paranoid dictator’s regime. Americans like those who have gone before us, Americans like those with whom many of us have served, and Americans like my own son and son-in-law then serving on warships in the Pacific - would have responded, and that missile launch would now be considered History’s most ill-conceived surprise attack on the Hawaiian Islands.  
Sometimes—and I feel this is especially true for those of us who have served—the things that were most miserable as we experienced them seem the funniest in retrospect and funnier still in every retelling. 
But that is not true for those incidents where life is lost, and I have never been able to laugh about that phone call from my daughter. There is something terribly unfunny about your child experiencing real fear for their life. I have, however, come to see that call as a gift. It showed me that my daughter’s first instinct, when she thought she had only minutes to live, was to call her father.
This kind of last communication with a loved one is exceedingly rare for those lost in service to our country.
If we could give that gift to our fallen service members—if they could reach out to us today— we can only imagine what they would say. But it’s a good exercise. It’s almost impossible to imagine those we so revere using their last moments to say anything vain, divisive, or mean-spirited.
Based on that call from my daughter, I like to think they would tell us that their final thoughts were of some other human being who was important in their life. 
As a veteran, I like to think they would tell us how all of our petty individual differences go away when we run, or ride, or sail together into battle. 
As a teacher, I’d like to think they would tell all the kids to put away their cell phones and pay attention. Maybe they would tell us ALL to stop pecking at our phones and start paying attention to each other. 
Maybe they would tell us to stop shouting past one another and start having real conversations. Or maybe they would ask us to remember that we never know which conversation with a loved one will be our last.
Unfortunately, the veterans we have lost cannot call us, so we gather here today to make that call to them. That call to say: “We miss you. We love you. You mean so much, and we appreciate all that you have done for us.”
God bless you all,
God bless all who serve this great nation,
And God bless America.

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