I spent more than three hours Monday stuck on a train in between St. Louis and Springfield, not even halfway to Chicago. A downed tree, they said. A machine failure, an unresponsive track partner, a lot of things. “Sorry for the delay in service,” the conductor said.
It is Memorial Day.
Everyone else is at their picnics, eating spare ribs and drinking cold beers and chatting with their friends, celebrating a day off from work and maybe toasting the armed forces and giving a salute. Back in Evanston, students are doing last-minute homework assignments or celebrating through the glorious art of procrastination. What else are you supposed to do at the end of a three-day weekend? You’re certainly not supposed to spend it on a train in the middle of nowhere.
A man with an army backpack boarded the train ahead of me. “Thank you for your service,” the Amtrak officer said. Service? Service is something you receive at a restaurant, something you do for a few hours a week at a food pantry, something you attend on Sunday, something that this train is currently out of. Thank you for your service?
Dec. 14, 2006: Apparently there was an attack. Far, far away, in a country hidden by the smoke of roadside bombs, biased news briefs, stifling sand dunes and censored cameras. A sniper, they said.
It is the seventh Memorial Day since we heard. His mother, my aunt, had to answer the door. All alone. I can’t imagine what that feels like: looking through the peephole, seeing the uniforms, knowing. How do you still answer the door?
“We can’t do anything more than apologize for the delay,” the train conductor said. “The second crew is on its way with new machinery. We’ll be giving away complimentary snack packs and bottles of water in the café car.” The limited supply ran out by the time I got there. “Free coffee?”
We had a care package sitting in my mom’s room, half-full and half-forgotten. It was by the windows, sitting in the middle of the floor, how could we not have sent it, she tripped over it every morning and yet we didn’t.
Instead, we threw it all away. After the funeral, after we had to face the open casket and the funeral procession lined by hundreds of his friends and vague acquaintances and people he’ll never meet and I’ll never meet but who waved flags and held signs and made me cry even harder, after our plane got home and I had to make up all my inconsequential eighth grade exams. After everyone else forgot we were still sad.
“Thank you for your service,” they all say, to my grandfather in his Korean War veteran cap, to my seventh grade crush now going off to basic training. They said it to him, too, on airport layovers and trips to the supermarket and military leave. It sounds so empty. It wasn’t service. Pick any other, non-overused word. It was sacrifice. It was commitment. It was blood sweat and tears, shed and sweated by fiancées and husbands, soldiers and training instructors, mothers and brothers. It was uncertainty and anxiety that doesn’t start or end with “service.”
“Again, we want to apologize once again for the delay in service. We are now 20 minutes to Springfield. 20 minutes to Springfield,” the tired voice of the conductor echoed. Thank you, sir, for your personal service. It was exceptional. Thank you to the work crews who rushed in on a holiday to get me back to Chicago. Thank you to the overworked woman in the café car. Thank you for your service.
But to every single lance corporal, lieutenant, officer, major, private, sergeant and all the ranks in between, to the local forces, the translators, the doctors, the police forces, the civilians who bear the brunt of the tragedy, to the husbands and wives, siblings, children, cousins, grandparents, godparents, neighbors, friends and to Lance Corporal Luke Carney Yepsen, because I never told you, just like I never sent that care package: Thank you for your lives, for your pain, for you unfathomable sacrifice and for your love for more than yourself.