☕️🇺🇸 MEMORIAM ☙ Monday, May 25, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🇺🇸🦠

———————————————————

Reprising last year’s tribute to the men who paid the last full measure — and to the families who’ve carried their absence for a lifetime. Remembering the price of freedom on today’s somber holiday.

Good morning, C&C, today is Memorial Day! Oddly, and unlike last year, mass media has run very few articles honoring the date. Last year, coverage was ubiquitous. Had I a bit more time, I would love to dig into the political and cultural pressures shaping the media’s annual level of attention to the holiday. Given the demands of dad duties for the family BBQ and the holiday, I have instead polished up last year’s popular Memorial Day essay— a brief, touching, and mildly irreverent reminder for the nation’s most somber holiday.

🇺🇸🌍 MEMORIAL DAY, 2026, COMMENTARY 🌍🇺🇸

Of all places, the Washington Post ran a thoughtful and poignant Memorial Day piece this morning (2025) in its op-ed section, titled, “Six veterans on the best way to honor Memorial Day.” It was a little incoherent —how can there be six best ways to celebrate?— but the story had heart and meant well.

Long before it was formally recognized as a federal holiday in 1967, Memorial Day’s first tender shoots poked through the ashes of the Civil War amidst the ruins of Charleston, South Carolina. You may have never heard of its inconvenient history. On May 1, 1865, mere weeks after the Confederacy’s hard-fought surrender, freed black Americans and Union troops held a public funeral and tribute ceremony for Union soldiers who died in a nearby Confederate POW camp.

Black workmen tenderly exhumed the bodies of 260 slain Union POWs from their inglorious mass grave, and gave each of the fallen soldiers proper individual burials. Nearly 10,000 people —mostly black freedmen and their children— marched around the site, singing hymns, giving readings, and laying flowers on the fresh graves. Union troops joined in, including the famed (black) 54th Massachusetts, and a national floral tradition was born.

By 1866, the practice of honoring the memories of fallen Civil War dead by strewing flowers on their graves expanded to include both sides of the conflict, Union and Confederate. As the years and wars marched along, the many Americans who’d sacrificed the last full measure of their devotion assembled in Heaven for their final earthly duty — becoming part of we the living’s special day of remembrance.

This morning, at 12pm, as he did last year, President Trump will memorialize all our fallen brothers and sisters who died in the line of duty by laying a ceremonial floral wreath at Arlington National Cemetery.

🇺🇸 My grandfather, Cmdr. William “Bill” Lewis Coon, survived World War II, having endured a harrowing, nightmarish ordeal after a Japanese submarine sank the Cape San Juan in the South Pacific. Bill and the rest of the mixed complement spent the next four days bobbing and swimming in the high seas while awaiting rescue. Around 1,000 men went into the water in 15-foot swells. Around 800 came out. Sharks, dehydration, exposure, and injuries got the rest.

The Sinking of the Cape San Juan in WWII

My mother still has the six-page letter Bill wrote to his wife Jane (my grandmother) after the disaster. Bill was lucky. He made it into one of the lifeboats, along with 30 other men who crowded into the tiny craft designed for ten. Nearly everyone, in and out of the boats, was drenched head to toe with oil.

“We sailed on the San Juan, and were hit at five-thirty in the morning off the Fijis near Tonga Tabu island,” he wrote to Jane, in his classic dry, clinical tone. “The order to abandon ship was given within one minute.” He proudly informed her that his lifeboat’s ad-hoc crew of enlisted men performed admirably, except that “the two officersalready mentioned folded up and could do nothing but moan.”

Cmdr. William Lewis Coon

Bill died at home when I was still in single digits, so I’ve only a few memories of him. In one particularly vivid recollection, he showed me around his amateur machine shop, where he hand-built air-powered, miniature locomotive engines as a hobby. I probably remember it so vividly thanks to the cognitive shock of hearing his highly-edited, cautionary tale about some seamen he knew who, messing around, connected the ship’s shop-vac to an unfortunate sailor’s rectum and his small intestine was hoovered out.

Bill’s grotesque story was not meant as an off-color jest to titillate a grandson. He wasn’t the joking type. It was a stern, unforgettable warning to be careful around the vacuum and never treat it as a joke. Be sure I’ll never forget that particular story of a soldier slain in the line of duty.

I wish I’d had more time with Bill.

🇺🇸 Michelle’s grandfather was not among the fortunate, and his death changed the entire trajectory of her life. Today, we honor his memory.

Roland Keiser, 25, was killed in action the day after Christmas, December 26th, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. Roland was transferred into the 318th Infantry Regiment, 80th Infantry Division, on or shortly after December 11, 1944, as part of emergency replacements ordered by General Patton following the German Ardennes counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge).

The 318th Infantry Regiment

By December 20, the plucky 101st Airborne Division, elements of the 10th Armored Division, and other U.S. units held a key Axis logistical hub in Bastogne, Belgium. But our boys had been surrounded by superior German forces. They were outnumbered and under-equipped, in temperatures approaching twenty degrees below zero, exposed to snow, freezing fog, and relentless German shelling.

On December 22nd, the Germans famously demanded surrender, prompting Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s iconic reply: “NUTS!” It was Hitler’s last big gamble, and the Germans devoted the cream of their most fanatical and experienced troops to the effort. Patton, defying the laws of physics themselves, somehow scraped together a 3-division relief command in only three days, cementing his reputation as one of history’s greatest battlefield generals.

On the same day, December 22nd, after enthusiastically accepting that impossible assignment, Patton scowled at forecasts of freezing storms and ordered 250,000 printed copies of this prayer sent to all troops under his command:

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.”

Roland and his fellow soldiers faced horribleweather conditions, to say the least. It was brutally cold, historically extreme, and nature itself became a third army fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. In what became his first and last combat assignment since arriving in Europe from boot camp, Roland and his comrades-in-arms slogged mile after frozen mile through what was, by many accounts, the worst winter combat of the entire European theater. It has been designated as the coldest winter in northern Europe since the Napoleonic Wars.

Constantly on a forced march racing against the clock, the soldiers spent night after wintry night sleeping on frozen ground without shelter, napping in foxholes, or just lying under trees in subzero temperatures. Due to the operational haste, many of them lacked winter gear. Frostbite was rampant; fingers and toes were considered expendable. Rations froze into solid, inedible blocks, and even matches wouldn’t light; the men used their own helmets as cookpots over small, smokeless fires. They often pushed forward, inch by bloody inch, through waist-deep snow, under relentless attack by mortars, snipers, and entrenched German soldiers.

Writing this history, I marveled over how in 2025, my kids consider it a terrible trialwhen the Internet is out for a few hours. But I digress.

Roland was officially reported MIA on December 26th while, under heavy fire, his unit fought heroically to relieve the 101st, enduring nonstop combat in their forced march from village to village as they fought through elite German resistance to Bastogne. The Americans ultimately won and saved Bastogne, thereby aiming the war at its definitive end. But American losses during the Battle of the Bulge —and particularly during the relief of Bastogne— were among the highest of any battle the U.S. fought during World War II. The casualties were staggering in scale and sobering in detail.

It was this bad: Only twenty-five percent of Roland’s heroic company survived to Bastogne. Three-quarters were killed, captured, or wounded.

🇺🇸 Roland’s death made Michelle’s grandmother a war widow. She raised her two children by herself. She never recovered from the shock and disappointment. Michelle’s mom was only two when her father died in combat, and she moved to Florida as soon as she turned 18 to escape her precarious home situation. The experience made her fierce, independent, indescribably hard-working, and much beloved.

Who knows how differently things would have turned out if Roland had survived the war?

Today, I hope you all enjoy a joyful and meaningful Memorial Day. While you’re flipping burgers, waving flags, and trying not to strangle your liberal relatives during pointless political conversations, take a moment to recall Roland and his many brothers (and sisters). They never asked for our thanks, but we offer them our undying gratitude and respect anyway.

May we never forget the cost of freedom. And may we, who do not fight, never stop being the kind of people who are worth fighting for.

Have a memorable and magnificent Memorial Day! The normal roundup will return tomorrow morning, as we catch up on all the weird and historic news in classic C&C fashion.

———————————————————