Opinion | Who Should We Honor on Memorial Day?

A more recent example, much closer to me, is someone I served with in the 101st Airborne Division. While I worked in signals intelligence in Iraq, my friend Alyssa Peterson worked in human intelligence. In 2003, near Mosul, she killed herself, and though her name is recorded on lists of those who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom, deaths like hers are often viewed differently from those in combat, perhaps because of the stigma attached to suicide.

And what of veterans who end their lives after they have returned? In 2020, more than 6,100 veterans died by suicide. Last year, Dean Lambert wrote in Military Times about the suicide of his son, Adam, a Marine who died a year after returning home from Afghanistan. “When I found him lifeless, wearing his desert combat uniform, clutching his dog tags in his left hand, there was no doubt he brought the war back with him,” Mr. Lambert wrote. Memorial Day, he argued, should be for “remembering not only the heroes who lost their lives from physical wounds, but those who also died fighting mental injuries they sustained on the same battlefields.”

How someone dies is not the only factor that influences how we honor our war dead. When matters, too. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, better known as the Wall, is inscribed with over 58,000 names of Americans who died in or supporting combat or within 120 days of injuries or illnesses incurred in the combat zone.

It’s the 120 days that gets me. What of those who died years later from what they were exposed to in Vietnam? We now know that Agent Orange is associated with health problems, including cancer and Parkinson’s. An untold number of veterans have died of those service-connected conditions. Their names will not be inscribed on the Wall, though the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is seeking to memorialize them in other ways.

Toxic exposures are not limited to those who served in Vietnam. My friend Kate Hendricks Thomas died of breast cancer last year; her doctors told her the cause was most likely the chemicals from burn pits that she was exposed to during her time as a Marine in Iraq. I will forever mourn and honor her, too, among our war dead this and every Memorial Day, whether or not her name is ever inscribed on a list of those killed in the global war on terrorism.