This letter to the editor is adapted from the author’s speech at the Riverside American Legion Post 488’s annual Memorial Day ceremony on May 29, 2023:

I have never thought of my Dad as not a soldier. Perhaps that’s what happens when you’re a command sergeant major’s son. Whether it was his high-and-tight haircut, drill weekends, or patches, medals, and uniforms, the Army has always been a part of our lives.

My brother and I were blessed to have been raised by parents who showed us, through their actions, the importance of service, who instilled in us a love of country, and who taught us that America is worth defending.

So it is particularly touching that our hometown of Riverside and the American Legion Post 488 decided to recognize and honor my father’s service in its annual ceremony. In fact, it is altogether fitting that we are gathered on this holiday to honor him more than a decade after he returned from Iraq and Afghanistan on Memorial Day Weekend in 2010.

One of my most cherished memories is embracing my dad at O’Hare Airport when he returned home from his deployment that day. I can still feel that embrace. And each time I reminisce about that moment, I am filled with pride and gratitude to be his son — and to be an American.

I believe there is something special about small-town celebrations on holidays like Memorial Day. These are communal acts of remembrance. Across the country, neighborhoods like ours are gathering to pay tribute to their own honored dead. This is what generations of American men and women have fought, and died, to make possible. It’s what the “Riverside 54” — those local heroes from successive generations and conflicts — fought and died to protect.

It’s not a grandiose, impersonal ceremony. It’s a genuine commemoration, year after year, of those who have served, and those who have sacrificed. That seems pretty American to me.

After college, I moved from Riverside to Washington D.C. Often I walk down to the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. To the left of Lincoln are inscribed these words: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Lincoln, of course, was speaking at Gettysburg in the context of the Civil War. But the lesson remains for us all gathered here on this Memorial Day: Freedom is not free.

Dylan W. Gresik, Riverside