To many, Memorial Day is a vague acknowledgment of loss. For admiral John Kirby, White House national security communications adviser, Memorial Day boils down to remembering Major Jaimie Leonard. U.S. Army Major Leonard, a former Warwick. N.Y. resident, died in Afghanistan in 2013.

“The last time I saw her was in Afghanistan at some base, somewhere,” Kirby wrote in a piece that ran in the Warwick Advertiser 11 years ago.

“Hey, sir” Kirby recalled her yelling to him when he saw her for the last time, “Embrace the suck yet?”

It is, as Major Leonard described it, a common phrase in the Army from soldiers trying to deal with the vicissitudes of Army life. It is, according to Kirby, a trooper’s way of not merely accepting military hardships but embracing them to the point of pride. Army life may be tough but the trooper is tougher.

Major Leonard, according to Kirby, was a woman of incredible optimism and good humor. She died at the hands of someone in an Afghan uniform. “I don’t know all the details. I don’t want to know all the details,” Kirby wrote.

Her death moved him dramatically and does to this day. “That’s what Memorial Day means to me, Brian,” he explained.

Trump has never served in the military and actively avoided service.

To Kirby and those who’ve served, Memorial Day is a recognition of what it means to be an American and the responsibility of citizenship. It is something the rest of us should never forget.

For me, it is about the honored thanks I give to members of the 41st Combat Support Hospital with whom I spent time during the first Gulf War. I remember them as I do every Veterans Day. Armed only with a camera and microphone, I deployed with them to Saudi Arabia and spent time with them in “Cement City,” where I saw the open burning pits that cost President Biden the loss of his........

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