In his essay for We Are the Mighty, Stephen Ruiz declared that President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Memorial Day speech observing the interment of an unknown Vietnam service member at Arlington National Cemetery “healed scars.”

“We write no last chapters,” Reagan told the crowd, Ruiz recalled. “We close no books. We put away no final memories. An end to America’s involvement in Vietnam cannot come before we’ve achieved the fullest possible accounting of those missing in action.”

‘The Vietnam Unknown never heard such cheers.’

More from Ruiz’s essay:

A decade after the final U.S. troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, some service members who fought in Southeast Asia couldn’t forget the harsh treatment that fellow Americans heaped upon them. Some were spat on while others received the middle finger or were called “baby killers.” They served their country and were blamed for the United States not defeating the North Vietnamese.

Reagan realized old wounds can’t go unattended. Two years after the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Reagan used his oratorical gifts to promote a better understanding of what Vietnam veterans endured.

The president continued a tradition from past wars and awarded the Medal of Honor to the Vietnam Unknown. That nice moment was not enough for Reagan. He reached out to military families residing in a continual, painful limbo because of a loved one MIA. Reagan told them that a grateful nation understood their plight.

“They live day and night with uncertainty, with an emptiness, with a void that we cannot fathom,” Reagan said, Ruiz recalled.

The author noted that Reagan’s speech added references to President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — and that volunteers read nearly 58,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans Wall in 1982 over the course of three days.

Ruiz also noted that Reagan read from a newspaper article about a restaurant dinner former Marines shared and that a group of college students — “some of them likely still in diapers when the first U.S. troops arrived in Vietnam in 1965,” Ruiz wrote — mingled with them, then applauded them as the veterans left the eatery.

Ruiz remembered that Reagan, reading from the newspaper article, quoted one former Marine’s response: “The whole week, it was worth it just for that.”

RELATED: Stories Behind the Stars: On a mission to honor every American who died in WWII

“The Vietnam Unknown never heard such cheers,” Ruiz added in his essay. “In so many ways, wars never end for those who knew someone MIA. So many unanswered questions remain, threatening to expose a deep sense of loss always lingering just below the surface.”

The author added that “in 1984, Reagan was acutely aware of that.”

In his speech, the president said of the unknown soldier, “About him we may well wonder, as others have: As a child, did he play on some street in a great American city? Or did he work beside his father on a farm out in America’s heartland? Did he marry? Did he have children? Did he look expectantly to return to a bride?”

In conclusion, Reagan noted, “Today, we simply say with pride, ‘Thank you, dear son. May God cradle you in His loving arms.'”

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This Memorial Day, thousands more U.S. servicemen and -women than usual are stationed in the Middle East due to the ongoing tensions with Iran, even as recent developments suggest a peace agreement may be near.

In late March, the New York Times reported that 50,000 U.S. troops were in the Middle East, an increase of about 10,000 from the 40,000 troops who are typically in the region. Many of those troops were stationed “at sea,” the outlet noted.

At the time, an additional 2,500 Marines, 2,500 sailors, and 2,000 Army soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division had just arrived. While the exact location of the Army paratroopers was not made public, they would be “within striking distance of Iran,” the Times reported.

It seems that little has changed in the weeks since. The Times reported on May 6 that the 50,000-strong U.S. forces remain “on standby in the region” as the delicate ceasefire with Iran hangs in the balance.

As recently as May 11, Trump said the ceasefire is on “life support” after Iranian officials sent a proposal that Trump called a “piece of garbage.”

RELATED: Trump administration establishes ‘red, white, and blue dome’ to allow safe passage through Strait of Hormuz

U.S. Navy/Getty Images

When reached for comment, the War Department referred Blaze News to U.S. Central Command. A source familiar with the matter told Blaze News that for safety reasons, CENTCOM does not comment on troop movements or schedules.

The four-to-six-week timetable President Donald Trump initially gave for the attacks on Iran has long since expired, but the president does not seem as focused on the protracted process as he is on the results.

And his patience may be paying off.

Over Memorial Day weekend, news of a possible peace deal began spreading online. While Trump has not divulged many details, he wrote on Sunday that “negotiations are proceeding in an orderly and constructive manner” and that America’s “relationship with Iran is becoming a much more professional and productive one.”

Trump even teased that should a deal be reached, Iran may someday join the “Nations of the historic Abraham Accords.” Still, he cautioned that the U.S. would not “rush into a deal in that time is on our side.”

Above all, Trump pledged that Iran will never have nuclear weapons and that any agreement he reaches with Iranian officials will be “THE EXACT OPPOSITE” of the “pallets of cash” deal former President Barack Obama made in 2016, quipping, “Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”

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Memorial Day means different things to different Americans. For some, especially those whose losses remain fresh, no national holiday is required to preserve memory. Grief already structures daily life; the formal rituals of remembrance — flags, ceremonies, cemetery visits — may still offer recognition, but the dead are hardly absent.

For others, the connection is more distant: a grandfather never met, a name on an old photograph, a relative spoken about only occasionally. The holiday can become less an occasion for immediate mourning than a meditation on inheritance and historical continuity.

Memorial Day, like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, exists because modern war produces anonymity at a scale human beings struggle to comprehend.

Still other Americans may have no direct personal connection to war at all. For them, that distance is itself a kind of blessing. Memorial Day may register primarily as a feeling of generalized gratitude — gratitude for the country itself and for those who fought on its behalf.

Yet the holiday’s deeper purpose is more specific and, in some ways, more demanding. Memorial Day asks us to remember individuals whose lives were interrupted by war, individuals with whom we may have nothing in common but our shared nation.

In recent years, debates over immigration, national identity, and social cohesion have forced Americans to ask what citizenship actually means. Memorial Day offers one answer older and less ideological than many offered by contemporary politics: Citizenship implies obligations not only to the living, but to the dead. A nation becomes more than a marketplace or administrative zone when its citizens believe they owe remembrance to those whose lives became bound up with the country’s history.

Memorial Day is one of our few remaining holidays that ask us to remember strangers. Not celebrities or family members or ideological allies, but ordinary people, fellow Americans whose lives were cut short by violence that history inevitably turns abstract.

In an increasingly individualized society, that obligation can feel unfamiliar. Yet to remember our fellow citizens across distance, class, region, and even generations is to affirm that we belong to one another in ways deeper than convenience or self-interest.

These are a few of the many Americans we remember today.

James Robert Montgomery

When Drew Gilpin Faust wrote about the Civil War’s culture of mourning in “This Republic of Suffering,” she lingered over a bloodstained letter written by James Robert Montgomery, a 26-year-old Confederate signal corps soldier mortally wounded at Spotsylvania in 1864.

A former law student from Mississippi, Montgomery spent his last moments taking pen to paper and — in labored but still elegant script — composing a farewell message to his father:

“I write to you because I know you would be delighted to read a word from your dying son.”

The word “delighted” now feels shocking. Yet, as Faust observed, Civil War Americans placed immense importance on the final words of the dying. Even in agony, Montgomery worried about consoling those at home.

“I would like to rest in the grave yard with my dear mother and brothers but it’s a matter of minor importance,” he wrote, just before signing off as “your dying son.” “Let us all try to reunite in heaven.”

His final resting place remains in Virginia.

Bert Stiles

Before World War II, Bert Stiles was a Colorado college student obsessed with becoming a writer. The son of a Denver electrician and a music teacher, he spent summers working as a junior forest ranger in Estes Park, experiences that became material for his short stories. While attending Colorado College, he wrote constantly — stories, poetry, newspaper features — and briefly embraced the pacifist sentiments common on American campuses before the war.

In 1941, convinced he could become a serious writer, Stiles hitchhiked repeatedly to New York to meet literary agents who had shown interest in his work. He eventually found mentors willing to support him, and his stories soon began appearing in publications like the Saturday Evening Post.

For many celebrated American writers, war became a harsh but formative education — the crucible from which emerged figures like Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and James Jones. Looking backward, it can almost seem like a foregone conclusion that their talent would survive long enough to become literature. But for every writer history remembers, there were others swallowed by the machinery of war before their lives had fully begun. History offers no exemption for promise.

Stiles continued writing throughout his combat service, producing articles and journal entries while flying bombing missions over Germany with the Eighth Air Force. He completed a full combat tour in B-17 bombers, volunteered for a second tour flying P-51 Mustangs, and was killed in November 1944 during a dogfight south of Hanover. He was 23 years old.

Henry T. Waskow

War correspondent Ernie Pyle became famous during World War II not for writing about generals or battlefield strategy, but for documenting the emotional lives of ordinary American soldiers. His most enduring dispatch may have been his account of the death of Captain Henry T. Waskow during the Italian campaign in 1944.

Pyle wrote:

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

“After my own father, he came next,” a sergeant told me.

Pyle described soldiers bringing Waskow’s body down a mountain trail by mule under moonlight alongside other dead men. One by one, exhausted infantrymen approached the body, lingering beside their captain in silence.

One soldier looked down and muttered simply, “God damn it.” Another stood over him for a moment before saying, “I sure am sorry, sir.”

Then one man sat beside Waskow’s body, holding the dead captain’s hand silently for several minutes before gently straightening his shirt collar and rearranging the torn edges of his uniform around the wound.

Thomas Joseph Fox Jr.

After he was killed in action in 1970, Thomas Joseph Fox Jr. was remembered by friends as an easygoing Sacramento teenager who loved football, rock music, and cars.

One fellow artilleryman later recalled Fox borrowing his Creedence Clearwater Revival tapes at a fire base near Chu Lai. Fox talked often about home. When his tour ended, he said, he wanted to spend weekends at William Land Park waxing and polishing his car while watching girls drive by.

Another childhood friend remembered playing tackle football with Fox at East Portal Park just before he shipped out to Vietnam. After the game, Fox encouraged him to try out for the high school football team — a small moment the friend said he still carried with him more than 40 years later.

One friend who enlisted alongside him later recalled escorting his body back to Sacramento by train.

“I miss you, old friend,” he wrote decades later. “I think about you all the time.”

Marvin Winston Murray

Marvin Winston Murray had been in Vietnam less than two months when he died at 21.

A high school classmate from New York City remembered practicing relay handoffs with Murray during track practice in New York.

Years later, the memory still lingered with him. After unexpectedly encountering friends dressed for Murray’s funeral while home on military leave himself, he eventually visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to see Murray’s name etched into the black stone wall.

“I’m going to get a rubbing,” he wrote decades later. “So I can frame it.”

Dan Bullock

Dan Bullock was only 15 years old when he was killed in the Vietnam War in 1969, likely the youngest American serviceman to die there. He had enlisted in the Marines at 14 after altering his birth certificate to appear older.

Born in North Carolina and later raised in Brooklyn, Bullock talked about becoming a pilot, then a policeman, and finally a Marine. “Mostly he wanted to make his mark in life,” his father later said. “He wanted to be something.”

Bullock arrived in Vietnam in May 1969 and was dead just 21 days later after an attack on An Hoa Combat Base. The Marines around him did not know his real age, but many sensed something unusual about him. One recalled years later: “He was younger, and he didn’t belong.”

When a reporter visited the family’s home, they searched for his last letter home but couldn’t find it. The line his stepmother remembered poignantly captures a certain youthful bravado.

“He said he was fine,” she recalled. “He said he didn’t have any holes in him.”

Chance Phelps

Chance Phelps was funny, outdoorsy, and always on the move — “the kind of person who had to be in the thick of things,” as his mother later put it.

Raised partly in Wyoming and Colorado, Phelps loved football, hunting, fishing, and making people laugh. A former teammate remembered him as “kind of like a country boy,” always smiling and doing something goofy. Another friend later admitted that before Iraq, “I thought we were both invincible, that nothing could touch us.”

After the attacks of Sept. 11, Phelps told his mother he felt compelled to serve.

“I absolutely have to go,” he said. “I’ve got to do something.”

Phelps was 19 when he was killed near Ramadi in April 2004, barely a month after arriving in Iraq. When Marines came to inform his mother in the middle of the night, she later recalled being struck most by one detail:

“They were crying.”

Unknown

At Arlington National Cemetery, the remains of one unidentified American serviceman from World War I lies buried without a name. The tomb simply reads:

“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.”

Memorial Day, like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, exists because modern war produces anonymity at a scale human beings struggle to comprehend. Each grave, each name carved into stone is an attempt to resist that anonymity, to point to an ordinary human life of infinite value.

Today is our humble opportunity to come together as a country and proclaim: These people existed. They belonged to us. They should not disappear.

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While some believe that Christians should stay out of politics, Pastor Josh Howerton not only disagrees — he believes that they “have a spiritual responsibility to vote.”

“What the Scriptures teach is that God has ordered the world in terms of three. God has established three institutions: the family, the church, and the state,” Howerton tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“In the same way that it would be morally wrong for a husband to refuse to lead his family, and it would be morally wrong for a pastor to refuse to lead his church, it would be morally wrong for the leaders of a nation to refuse to lead the nation,” he explains.

“But this is what’s really important. We live in a constitutional republic. We do not live in a democracy. We live in a constitutional republic. In a constitutional republic … the elected officials are representatives of the people,” he continues.

“So in a constitutional republic, the voters are at the top of the org chart. So I think that’s something that I think a lot of well-meaning, but I’ll gently say, maybe a little naive, a lot of well-meaning but maybe naive Christians forget,” he adds.

Howerton points to Romans 13, which instructs that God has established the governments and governing leaders in our constitutional republic.

“If you are a voting Christian, God has placed you at this time, in this place, at the top of the constitutional republic org chart in which you find yourself,” he explains.

“And so, I would gently say in the same way that if a man won’t lead his family, we messed up. If a pastor won’t lead his church, we messed up. If the Christian voters of a nation refuse to lead that nation and abdicate their spiritual responsibility to lead,” he says, adding, “I think we’re messing up.”

And the reason it’s so important not to mess up is because “whatever God creates, Satan tries to co-opt.”

“In Genesis 2 and 3, Adam refuses to lead his family … so Satan does,” Howerton tells Stuckey.

“In Revelation 2 and 3 … you had some passive pastors who instead of leading their churches to repent of sin, they led their churches to tolerate sin. So they in their passivity, and Romans 2 and 3 literally say those churches became quote ‘a synagogue of Satan,’” he says.

“In the same way, if spirit-filled godly people will not lead their nation by voting,” he continues, adding, “godless people will.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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