Reflections on Memorial Day 2020

On 31 May 1990, nearly 30 years ago, I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army. I received the commission from General Colin Powell, our commencement speaker who was then serving as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was a sweltering day at West Point, the kind I'd gotten used to over four long years at the Military Academy. It was a day of great pride and great relief, but mostly a day of excitement about what was to come.

If you had asked me on that day whether I intended to stay in the Army past my West Point commitment of five years, I likely would have given you a no. Yet, I did stay. For nearly 22 years. Challenging assignments around the world, including tours in Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan. Time as a paratrooper at Fort Bragg and as an instructor of cadets at West Point. The amazing opportunity to build and lead my own Battalion. And the great privilege to serve with some of the most selfless and honorable people I've come across in my lifetime: those willing to lay down their lives in service of what America stands for.

It was a journey for which I am incredibly grateful, one inspired by my father, Noel Koch, who served as an enlisted soldier in Vietnam and later as an official in three separate Presidential Administrations.

So some thirty years on from the day he and my mother pinned the bars on my uniform at a grassy area overlooking the Hudson River to almost a decade ago when my son Jet presented him with a flag at my retirement ceremony, I thought I would share something my Dad wrote several years ago for a Memorial Day speech which he gave to a veterans group in Somers Point, New Jersey, near where my parents live.

Even as we mourn those among us who have fallen victim to the global pandemic, to include our heroic front-line health care workers whose courage in the face of this vicious virus inspires us all, let us remember on this day those who have sacrificed for our freedoms throughout the past 244 years since our nation was born.

Memorial Day 2013 – Keynote by Noel Koch, Somers Point, NJ

We observe here a tradition that began with General Order No. 11, given by General John A. Logan in May 1868, 145 years ago today. It said, in part:

“This day in May is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades . . . whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

“If other eyes grow dull and other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain in us.”

Memorial Day . . .

It is a day of reverence, of solemn remembrance. 

It is a day for honoring those who laid down their lives . . . for something quite extraordinary actually; for something quite simple. For nothing more, and nothing less, than an idea.

I have been privileged to serve America in countries all around the world. Wherever I travel, I visit the national monuments, the cemeteries where that country buries its dead – because these tell you everything worth knowing about a country.

I came across a little cemetery when I served in Vietnam. Buried there were men who died in the French-Indochina War. Each headstone bore an inscription with a name and a date, and the words “Mort pour la France” – Died for France.

In Germany, the words are “Todt fur der Vaterland” – Died for the Fatherland.

In Russia: Died for the Motherland.

In Japan: Died for the Emperor.

In England: For King and Country.

There are no words like that on the stones beneath which our countrymen sleep; no sacrifice for king or country. Rather, those we keep in our hearts every day and remember with special devotion this day made the ultimate sacrifice for the idea on which our country was founded.

They did not go to foreign places to seize the resources of others, or to exploit their labor, or to take their land on our behalf. As Colin Powell once said: “All we have asked of those for whom we fought was six feet of earth in which to bury our slain.” And for that our sons and daughters gave it all for the idea on which our nation was founded – the most profound idea in human history: the idea that men and women are born free, and by their birth alone entitled to liberty and justice.

The Bible teaches “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend.” What then shall we say of a nation that sends its sons and daughters to offer up their blood so that strangers, people they don’t even know, may live in freedom, able to realize the liberty and justice that we consider to be the God-given right of all men and women?

It is those Sons and Daughters we mourn today, those Fathers and Mothers we honor today, those Sisters and Brothers we remember today with reverence.

The bones of our fallen heroes hallow the earth here in our Land, and in lands across the globe. But their souls are borne home by angels of mercy, and by our prayers, to eternal life in the mansions of the Lord.