Editor’s Note: The Wanderer is sharing keynote addresses as spoken by guest speakers at this year’s local Memorial Day observances.

            Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today. It is a tremendous honor, and I feel entirely inadequate to be standing in front of you to discuss the men and women who came before us to make this nation great.

            Now, with this said, I know what you military members and veterans in the audience see when you look at me. For those of you not in the know, there is no more judgmental community than those of veterans and other military members. Checking uniform standards, ensuring ribbon racks are covered and aligned.

            What they see when they look at me is an Air Force guy, not a pilot (which means cool fighter pilot stories are off the table), but still an officer. They are giving an internal eye roll and saying, “We’re in for a long morning of stories about clearing printer jams…”

            Well, I’m here to tell you that I was a young Marine once and for 10 years, I was a proud member of the enlisted ranks. I stood at parade rest for many, many formations and change of command ceremonies listening to some officer bloviate about how his unit is the best in the Marine Corps while young junior enlisted passed out after being told not to lock their knees at parade rest. I feel your pain. So I promise, no bloviating, and I’ll be brief and to the point.

            I’m also not going to make this speech easy on you. There are no free passes. We seem to have grown accustomed in this country to always thinking it’s someone else’s problem. That one is not smart enough, creative enough, or lacks the experience needed to get the mission done.

            It’s a fallacy created by our own insecurities to keep us in our place. My intent in delivering this speech today is to clearly illustrate that this is not the case.

            In my experience in close to two decades of military service, the men and women in uniform, regardless of their job, are not special. They’ve made a choice to serve, and they made a choice to honor their commitment and accept the consequences of their decision, whether good or bad. That’s it. There are no superheroes, no life hacks, only those that are willing to act and those that choose to allow others to act on their behalf.

            I’d ask that you consider which of these two personas you are right now and if you are happy with this choice.

            To be clear, the world needs both, but from my perspective, too many people sell themselves short and allow others to dictate which path they choose. “The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!” — Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945.

            This quote by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1945 is the best I’ve come across at providing a glimpse into the culture of the Marine Corps. I was a combat Marine, an infamous 0311, which is to say an infantryman.

            If pilots represent the cool kids in the Air Force, the infantry were the pilots of the Marine Corps. My path to the Corps was not exactly straight and narrow as is the same for many who enter the service. I was a subpar football player in high school, raised not far from here in a town called Whitman. I played quarterback and probably had more interceptions than touchdown passes over the course of my career.

            Needless to say, when the season concluded, college football recruiters were not exactly lining up outside of my homeroom with scholarship offers. There was one college, however, that for reasons unbeknownst to me, must have been in desperate need of a quarterback and made me an offer.

            Norwich University, located in sleepy Northfield, Vermont, was a military school with an average Division 3 football program. Raised in a Christian home, my parents and I both thought going to military school could provide a structured and rigorous education without all of the temptation and extracurricular activities of a standard civilian school.

            Despite my grandfather being a career Navy Corpsman and my father’s passion for the military, I had no actual desire to join the service. On September 11th, 2001, I was sitting in English class as a junior in high school. While I considered it a tragedy, to me as a teenager, it was someone else’s problem to deal with. I certainly wasn’t compelled to join the service at that point in my life.

            Fast forward to January 2005. I’m running off a bus at some unknown and ungodly hour of the night towards the infamous yellow footprints of Paris Island Recruit Training Depot. Screaming drill instructors and terrified recruits abound, and I’m internally questioning my life choices.

             In just a few short hours, I’d complete my in processing, head freshly shaved, uniform issue complete with “go fasters” (or sneakers for normal humans), and assigned to Platoon 3029, India Company, Third Battalion.

            I know you’re probably thinking, what happened to college football and the whole structured education thing, Chris? Well, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started to kick into high gear in 2003 and 2004, several of my friends started to go overseas, and the thought occurred to me that this wasn’t someone else’s problem. This was OUR problem.

            And so, I decided to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. It wasn’t long after I checked into my unit, Alpha Company, 1st Bn 25th Marines, that I met what would become my closest friend in the Corps.

            John was a young carpenter who was raised here on Cape Cod. To a kid raised as a rule-follower, John embodied what it was to be a Marine. Hair shaved closed, square jawed and what appeared to be a fearless mentality. He had machine gun rounds tattooed around his forearm in an apparent attempt to not run out of ammunition when he needed it the most.

            He was a wild man. Predeployment training in the USMC or the training received by a unit prior to entering a war zone, typically occurs in southern California at a place called Twentynine Palms. Needless to say, there are no palm trees.

            The training schedule is unrelenting and for several months, Marines are subjected to long days and nights in the “field” i.e., on some obscure rifle range in the middle of the desert with no running water or electricity and typically sleeping on the ground.

            Occasionally, when the stars aligned, there was a gap in the schedule, and Marines would get “liberty” or essentially a few days off without training where Marines were let loose on the local area to unwind. Liberty was few and far between during predeployment workups and so, when the opportunity presented itself, one did not squander the chance to get into civilian clothes and leave the base in one’s rearview mirror.

            On one such occasion, John and I went to Palm Springs for a long weekend because we heard they had a great public library system and wanted to do some “studying.” After a couple of days of “studying” at the local library establishments, we were exhausted and heading home when John had an amazing idea.

            “Pull over,” he said, with supreme urgency in his voice. He had spotted a local tattoo shop and wanted to surprise his fellow Marines with an amazing new tattoo. Not uncommon in the Marine Corps.

            What I failed to mention is that mustaches, though authorized, are not encouraged. Growing a mustache that borders on the line of USMC regulation is a way that a young Marine can show some small signs of rebellion against his chain of command. John had taken it upon himself to grow an obnoxious mustache over the course of our training and dubbed himself “Mustache Pete.”

            After several minutes in the tattoo shop, John tipped his hand as he had to run outside to ask us how to spell “Mustache.” Not long after, John came out proudly smiling. When we couldn’t spot the new tattoo, he turned around, dropped trow and there on his derriere was printed in bold print, “Mustache Pete.”

            He was so proud. Despite his peculiarities, John always ran to the sound of the guns. While on deployment in the spring of 2006, John and I were located at an entry control point on the perimeter of the city of Fallujah, Iraq.

            Due to our proximity, hearing gunfire and explosions was somewhat of a daily occurrence. On one such day, the gunfire was particularly close while I was on post in an overwatch tower. I took my position behind my squad automatic weapon and promptly called in the activity on the radio, awaiting an enemy incursion into our position. I looked up from behind my sites and realized John had sprinted hundreds of meters ahead, in a beeline for the gunfire and in doing so had completely cut off my line of fire. He got screamed at for this but really didn’t see what he did wrong and, if given the opportunity, would have made the same choice again.

            Another time, when we were being actively engaged by the enemy, John took up a position behind a 240 Golf machine gun and unleashed several hundred rounds that promptly quieted the enemy.

            A small-town carpenter, with a Mustache Pete tattoo, made the choice to act.

            John and I were fortunate, that deployment. We both survived, even as the battalion took 11 KIA and many more were injured.

            August 16, 2006, proved to be a particularly difficult day. The battalion lost Captain John McKenna and Lcpl Michael Glover. John, a 30-year-old state trooper from Brooklyn, and Michael, who dropped out of law school to join the Marines, were killed by sniper fire.

            Captain McKenna earned the Silver Star for his actions that day and part of his citation reads… Captain McKenna was leading First Squad on a foot patrol in Al Fallujah, Iraq. As the patrol neared a friendly observation post, it was suddenly ambushed by well-concealed insurgents firing sniper rifles, automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades from buildings, rooftops and cars to the north, south and east. The point man at the front of the patrol (Lcpl Glover) was fatally wounded by the hail of enemy bullets and fell in the middle of the intersection where the fire was most heavily concentrated. Captain McKenna instantly rushed into action, directing the fires of his men, and ordering them to employ smoke grenades to obscure the enemy’s vision. Ignoring the imminent peril from the heavy incoming fire, Captain McKenna ran into the intersection in an effort to save his downed Marine. Completely exposed to the enemy fire, he calmly knelt next to the stricken Marine to assess his condition. As he began to drag the Marine to a covered position, Captain McKenna was hit by enemy fire and mortally wounded.

            Captain McKenna gallantly gave his life in an attempt to save one of his Marines. In a letter he wrote while in Iraq that was read at his funeral, Lcpl Glover was quoted as saying, “I took an oath, and it’s the best oath I ever took. I’m at peace if I come back with parts of me missing. And I’m at peace if I don’t come back at all.”

            John and Michael came from ordinary backgrounds, very similar to you and I. But they made a choice to act, to stand by their commitment to themselves, to each other and to their country.

            As for me, I fired thousands of rounds of ammunition throughout my career … every one of them in training. I spent over 12 months in Iraq over the course of two separate deployments and never fired my weapon. I was shot at, but unable to return fire due to not having positive identification of the enemy.

            For civilians, they would consider me blessed…. Someone upstairs was watching over me. For an infantry Marine, it was devastating, equivalent to sitting on the bench during the Super Bowl.

            It wasn’t that my deployments weren’t busy. Violence was all around me. I would hear the screams for help on the radio, watched as casevac convoys raced past my position on the way to the battalion aid station and stood there helplessly. Even today, approaching two decades later, this is the first time I’ve spoken publicly about this. I have tremendous guilt in not feeling that I did my part and have a consistent sense of inadequacy.

            My point in sharing these facts is not to garner your sympathy, but to illustrate that everyone experiences doubt, guilt and shame. No one is 100% confident or even close. The great Army General Stanley McChrystal talked in his memoir “My Share of the Task” about how he was doubtful in his ability to lead with every promotion he received.

            I would argue that confidence is not the virtue we should be striving for, but courage. Those who assert they are not afraid are either lying or foolish. Courage does not deny the existence of fear, but rather enables us to conjure up the strength to overcome it. To give ourselves permission to fail, to look stupid, or if we dare to persist, to succeed, to change, or ultimately to be heroic.

            As I stated at the beginning of this speech, self-doubt becomes the excuse that enables us to think it’s someone else’s problem, that we lack the talent to accomplish our goals. The reality is we have one shot, and the clock is ticking, even as we speak.

            The true beauty of the heroes we spoke about today is that they recognized this, accepted the responsibility and sacrificed their opportunity in the hopes that you and I would carry the torch. They knew intrinsically that the fabric that comprises the strength and ingenuity of American spirit resides in the hearts of its people.

            You see, being a hero doesn’t necessarily mean you are charging a machine gun position or executing a dramatic rescue. It’s having the courage to take the next step, even or especially when you are terrified. Maybe it’s having an honest conversation with your significant other, turning off the television to play with your kids, or starting the business plan you’ve been putting off. It means choosing to see life as a gift not to be squandered because many others are not as fortunate.

            We (I’m at the top of this list) waste so much energy complaining and worrying and getting angry over seemingly insignificant things. It’s a choice. We all have a finite amount of time on this Earth. We can choose to use it superficially, buying all the things we are supposed to buy, saying all the things we are supposed to say and checking all the boxes, but when we look back on our lives, it will be a surface-level existence.

            Choose to take the hard path that makes us stronger in the end. Pain can often be the deliverance from defeat. Engage in meaningful conversation and listen. Help others who are struggling. Love each other unabashedly. Give up your time to do so. Be grateful for all of it. Make it count. Make it count. Make it count. Your actions are what matters most.

            If you do these things, and you live what you say, you will be perpetually honoring the spirit of the fallen and their sacrifices daily, and it will not go unnoticed. By embodying their warrior spirit, this becomes more of a thank you than waiving a flag, attending a Memorial Day parade, or posting on social media ever could be.

            I’ll end with a quote from one of my favorite children’s books, called “Mikey and the Dragons” by Jocko Willink. “And from that day forth, Mikey changed his mind, And he left his fears and his worries behind. Even when he was afraid of something out there, he knew how to get control of his fear. He would stand up straight and hold his head high, and like the Prince, look his fear in the eye. And that is always the best thing to do, if there is something that really scares you. Don’t get controlled by the feelings of dread. Remember most of the fear is just in your head. This isn’t to say you won’t be afraid. But you should know that fear is ok. Everyone gets nervous and has a good scare, and feels like they are going into the dragon’s lair. But when that happens and you don’t want to go, think of the lesson the Prince got to know: That when you are feeling so scared of it all, you just need to remember that the dragons are small.”

            Thank you.

By Christopher Bonzagni, U.S.A.F. Major