Every hero has an origin story. These are theirs.

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I once read a poem about the dash between the date of birth and the date of death on a headstone; how all of life is lived within that mark.

I've found that the vast majority of tributes to fallen American military members are about the dates, not the dash.

Those tributes are almost always written by someone who deeply appreciates the man or woman they are honoring, but are often written by someone who never actually knew the Hero. They’re tributes that tell us where the member served, when they fell, and the honors they earned; they preserve statistics more than stories.

 

I’m building something different.

 

Not to replace those tributes, but to stand beside them.

To celebrate the lives that were lived, rather than reporting the lives that were lost.

This site is a living and growing virtual museum to preserve and display a collection of photos, stories, videos, and more, that tell us who these fallen Heroes were before they answered their nation's call. The soccer tournaments they won. The lessons they learned as scouts. The first time they held their newborn child. The practical jokes they played, the music they loved, the dreams they chased, and the countless ordinary moments that made them extraordinary to the people who knew them.

Instead of a name and two dates, Heroes will be celebrated and illustrated in a beautiful mosaic of memories.

These virtual walls will be filled not just by historians, but by parents, siblings, spouses, children, classmates, neighbors, first grade teachers, coaches, brothers and sisters in arms, and so many more.

I regret that so many records have been lost to history, particularly for those who fell over eighty years ago, before technology aided in record keeping. Alas, we cannot change the past, but we can preserve the memories that remain, and we can ensure that the memories we have today are not lost tomorrow.

This project is huge, and it will take years to build; it has already taken years to build. I hope you'll be patient as the virtual museum grows. Please visit often, share your memories of the Heroes within, and watch as we evolve with every shared memory.

On a personal note, the site was inspired by my own loss of a very dear friend, killed in Iraq in 2007. I wanted the world to know how smart, funny, and caring he was—not just that he was killed. As I thought about him, I thought how every one of our fallen Heroes has had people in their lives who have felt the same way, who likely haven’t had a forum in which to share. Now they –now we– do. Every Hero deserves to be remembered, and everyone who has lost a Hero deserves a place to celebrate them.

If you find yourself in agreement, please share this page. In building it, I learned of the falling of another young man with whom I attended high school; sadly, I think a lot of people may share a similar experience, and they, too, will want to share their stories of that guy who sat two rows back in Marine Biology in 10th grade.

Because every Hero had a life before they became a name on a memorial.

And every one of those lives deserves to be remembered.

If you have questions that weren't answered here, I invite you to reach out to me at: contact@rememberwhotheywere.org.

Thank you for visiting.

 

 

 

P.S. I have to put the fine print and disclosures somewhere, so I put them here.