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Good morning everyone. Thanks for the honor and privilege to come and say a few words to you today. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Greg Clancy, I’m the St Louis County Veteran Service Officer for Ely and Hibbing. I’m a retired US Army veteran with over 27 years of service. I spent over 24 years in Army Aviation as a helicopter crewmember flying, a particularly dangerous occupation in the military. As such, I have lost a lot of friends both in peacetime and wartime, and unfortunately it comes with the job, but you never get over it. I was always told, if you fly long enough you’ll lose friends along the way to accidents and enemy action. I’ve experienced both.
So what does Memorial Day mean to me; well the intent for the day is to take the opportunity to remember those who paid the ultimate price and are no longer with us. Personally, every day is memorial day. I think of my lost friends everyday, not just on Memorial Day. I think of my lost friends when something funny happens that gives me the “remember back when” feeling and I laugh. I think of them when I see their wives and kids, and see how they have rallied to live life and thrive instead of being bogged down in grief and loss, oh it’s still there but their lives are stronger. I think of them whenever I see a helicopter fly overhead, and chuckle about how all of us would have flown even if the Army didn’t pay us, because we would have done anything to fly. I think of them when I hit a rough patch in life and feel like giving up, I realize I’m still here and cannot quit, because they don’t have that option anymore. When I think of them, I try to focus on how they lived their life and the memories I carry about them rather than on how they died. I would argue, most veterans and families of lost servicemembers most likely feel the same. We do not need one day to remember our fallen because we remember them all the time, as we navigate through life without them.
There’s a great line from Saving Private Ryan when Tom Hanks is dying on the bridge and whispers to Matt Damon’s character, “Earn this, earn this life”. I think that is a very strong point to make, those of us survivors should strive to make our lives better than just living or existing, but truly worth someone’s sacrifice. I know I felt that way after returning home from a year in Iraq. I felt genuinely lucky to be alive and felt I had received a new lease on life to earn a good life.
Sometimes I like to think that the fallen are somehow in a better place, at least that’s what I tell myself. We are the ones, the living, the survivors, that are left to wade through the mess, to try and process the images, the death and the guilt. However, we cannot carry that burden forever, so we try not to let it destroy us. Many of our friends did not come home - but we did. Many of us have left the battlefield, but not the war within our own soul, or we struggle to remove ourself from that day or that time. We can’t carry that weight forever. So I hope that one day we can be at peace with ourselves. Always remembering, always honoring the dead, and choosing to truly live, To Earn our life. Those who have given their lives - are in a better place, and we will see them again. Maybe one day we will find out that they were the lucky ones, and we are the ones that had to grieve, mourn, and carry the pain through this world.
In closing, Memorial Day is an exceptionally special day. It’s a day for folks to take time out of their busy day, barbecues and parties and think about those we have lost, even if just for a moment, think about a good memory of them and maybe whisper their name, for as long as their name is spoken, they are truly never gone.
