05/25/2026
I shared this to my barbecue page yesterday for Memorial Day, and today discovered that the write-up I did for the pictures didn't transmit. Let's just say I wasn't pleased.
I treat nearly every day as Memorial Day, sort of. Anyone who follows me on social media knows I regularly post stories I see when I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund "Wall of Faces," a massive website with an individual page for every one of the 58,000 plus service members who were killed in action in Vietnam. Each page has whatever pictures and information the VVMF could find, plus a section in which anyone can post stories, tributes, etc.
I take a lot of inspiration reading the citations on medals for bravery; it reminds me that heroes are not the stuff of myth. They come from every city and small town in America and will still pay the ultimate price to save their friends, even halfway around the world and knee deep in a war most of them would have described as "bu****it."
This is Lance Corporal Michael David Stewart, and he was killed saving his fellow Marines in an ambush. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, but while I was visiting his "Wall of Faces" page, I noticed that unlike many other similar infantrymen, there were no tributes from anyone in his unit. He hadn't been with his unit for very long, so perhaps he wasn't well-known; it was common to stay distant from unit replacements until they had shown they could survive for awhile. Or maybe the men who would have remembered him best were later killed or just never got on the internet.
In any event, that called out to me and I'm asking you to read this snippet from Lance Corporal Stewart's Navy Cross citation for Memorial Day 2026.
"For greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13 🇺🇸
