Memorial Day to most Americans, is about a day off work. BBQs and beers, sunburns and sales, and maybe a passing thought about some old guy in uniform outside your local COSTCO.

Not to me.

These days, Memorial Day punches me in the throat before I’ve even had my morning coffee. I see the faces of friends who never made it back. I hear their laughs, their childhood stories, and their bad jokes. I remember the intensity of SEAL training, the sacrifice, the rush of combat, and the silence that follows when their names stop being called back home at the Team.

The Faces I Can’t Forget

I wrote about them in Among Heroes, but those words only scratch the surface. Guys like Glen Doherty—my best friend, my brother in every sense but blood—killed in Benghazi. Glen had a laugh that could shake the walls and a heart twice the size of his biceps. We trained together, deployed together, and somehow thought we’d outlive it all. That’s the biggest lie we tell ourselves in combat—that death only happens to other people.

But Glen died doing what he believed in, standing between evil and innocence. Every time someone brings up his name, I get this ache in my chest and a smile on my face. That kind of paradox becomes normal in our world.

I’ve lost more brothers than I care to count. Some not dead but lost to psychological trauma and substance abuse. That’s what they don’t tell you on Fox News. These are the real ones. Men who would—and did—die for the person next to them.

And I’ve been in the middle of the aftermath more times than I want to admit—fielding calls from families, dodging shrapnel from unhinged widows, grief that turns to rage faster than a flashbang goes off. And who can blame them?

Grief isn’t clean. It’s messy and unpredictable, like war itself.