I have a confession about Memorial Day.
For much of my life, its primary significance was that it was the gateway to summer vacation. During my school days (1974 through 1986) Memorial Day weekend was always the final weekend of the academic year. Therefore, Memorial Day was a time for celebrating, not reflecting.
I was of course aware of the dead at Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima. But those were historical figures, frozen in amber. Not people whom I actually knew. My grandfather was a World War II vet. My father and uncle served during the Vietnam era. But they all made it back okay.
Now let me tell you about Keith.
Keith ran high school track with me during the mid-1980s. We weren’t best friends, but I definitely knew him and liked him. (He was one year ahead of me in school.)
Keith was a great sprinter. He received a partial track scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. But things happened, and he ended up leaving college to join the US Navy. He served seven years.
After being honorably discharged from the US Navy, Keith joined a US Army Reserve unit in Wisconsin, where he had settled.
Keith was deployed to Iraq shortly after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He died near Mosul, Iraq, in the summer of 2004, the result of an IED explosion.
Keith was 37 years old by then. He was survived by his wife and two children.
Since 2004, I tend to think about Keith on Memorial Day. Because he is someone I actually knew. I remember watching him run at track meets. I remember him making wisecracks. Back then (circa 1985), he was just another ironic Gen Xer.
A final note: Keith’s real name was not Keith. I intentionally gave him a pseudonym, because I wanted Internet searches on his name to go to his online memorials, not to my website.
But if you want to read more about him, who he really was, you can read his story here.
-ET