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May 24, 2026
He was 20.
So many others were younger.
In fact, more than a third of all Americans who died in World War II were 21 or younger.
This is my Uncle Mickey.
Every Memorial Day, I think about him.
And the generation he served with.
I keep coming back to something simple:
These guys never thought of themselves as heroes.
My uncles, the ones who made it home, rarely talked about what they did over there.
Not really.
You'd ask, and they'd shrug. Change the subject. Pour another cup of coffee.
Pop a Yuengling.
They were bakers, mechanics, stone masons, and steel workers.
Ordinary guys from ordinary towns.
I used to joke that the only times they ever left those towns were for funerals and World Wars.
All they really wanted was to finish the job and get back home.
If they could have won the war in a day, they would've been home for dinner.
Instead, they went out and saved the world.
I think about that a lot.
How they came home, hung up their uniforms, and just... went back to work.
Back to their tools, their pencils, their lives, as if what they did was simply something that needed doing, and they were the ones there to do it.
No parades necessary. No glory required.
Sadly, so many of them, like my Uncle Mickey, never got to hang up that uniform.
They never made it back to the dinner table.
That's who this weekend is for.
So between the cookouts and the long weekend, I hope we all take a quiet moment to remember why we get to have any of it.
Because some very humble, very ordinary, very extraordinary people made sure of it.
We owe them everything.
