Happy Memorial Day

My dad is in Section 64 at Arlington Cemetery,
near the 9/11 Memorial.

Some required reading today:

 -- Memorial Day: Remembering My Father.  My dad died in 2007.  I finally wrote this obituary in 2011.

 -- ‘Charlie Mike’ on Memorial Day.  My classmate Mike wrote this op-ed for the Washington Post in 2014 talking about his experiences and the experiences of all combat veterans on what has become a little-understood holiday in America.

-- Why and How I Fell in Love With Army Athletics.  Alex is the son of a classmate and an aspiring sportswriter.  Though still in high school, he has been amazingly successful at developing sources inside Army Sports, to the point that he now has a strong national following among Army

fans.  This is his story, and if it's not--quite--a Memorial Day piece, it's still excellent.

Alex writes for Forgotten 5.

 -- Decades-Long Fight to Identify War Hero’s Remains (NY Times).

"In the early days of World War II, a baby-faced West Point graduate with a rifle in one hand and a tommy gun in the other made a one-man attack in the Philippines against the invading Japanese that altered the course of the war.

Jumping from foxhole to foxhole in the jungle, he downed enemies with grenades, gunfire and eventually his bayonet before he was killed. The attack repelled an advance that delayed the Japanese for months, and within weeks the soldier, 23-year-old First Lt. Alexander Nininger, was awarded the first Medal of Honor of the war."

-- Memorial Day: A tour of the West Point cemetery (The Journal News).  In which my friend LTC Dave Siry, West Point historian, gives a tour of the Academy's cemetery to a bunch of loony-sounding tourists.

Me & My Dad.  This was taken in 1995, 
shortly after I finished at West Point.