When Memorial Day becomes every day

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Kevin Powers signed up for the Army before finishing high school and went to basic training the day after he graduated.

  He was in Iraq for a year. And when he returned home, he managed to some of what that experience was like in his critically praised novel “The Yellow Birds.”

  Powers says it’s hard to record what you are truly thinking and feeling in combat because, in many ways, you aren’t doing either. Much of the fighting happens on instinct and adrenaline.

  That’s the situation so many Americans still face and, in Powers’ Humble Opinion, what we need to remember tonight.

• Kevin Powers:

  If you’re watching this today, perhaps you’re taking a break from a family barbecue, or maybe you have just returned from shopping for some much needed item that this weekend’s sales have allowed you to purchase.

  I hope the extra time with your loved ones is rewarding, and the long weekend a satisfying break from the challenges of work, or school, or parenting.

  But I humbly ask you to consider the following. Fourteen years ago, I spent Memorial Day looking for IEDs in and around the city of Mosul, Iraq. I had only been in country for a couple of months. My unit had not yet suffered its first casualty.

  But, as summer began, the purple fingers of Iraqi citizens casting their votes felt like a cause worth facing that danger for.

  But, soon enough, something shifted. Attacks increased in both intensity and frequency over the summer. And by the time autumn came around, several members of my company had been wounded, some seriously, and some terrifyingly so, especially when you knew you had to go back outside the wire again the next day.

  I will admit, I was scared pretty much all of the time. But I did my job to the best of my ability, and I still believed that we might all make it home together.

  But that’s not how war goes. Close to Christmas, as 2004 was coming to a close, our unit lost two young men. Their names were Sergeants Nicholas Mason and David Ruhren. They were both 20 years old.

  I grieved for them and their families then, and I still grieve for them today. And I would ask you to consider the fact that since our current wars began in 2001, as of mid-May, there have been 6,957 others to grieve for.

  Just a month ago, a young man from Colorado was killed in Afghanistan. It’s hard to believe that, when I came home from Iraq in 2005, he was 9 years old.

  So, today, I would ask you to take a moment to ask, how many more names might be added to the long list of those we will be asked to remember next year, and to also remember the thousands of veterans, actively serving men and women, and grieving families, their fallen brothers and sisters, for whom Memorial Day doesn’t just fall on the last Monday in May, but on every single day of the rest of their lives.