Memorial Day...A Friend Who Did Not Return

Quick answer: What is John Fenzel's poem “A Friend Who Did Not Return” about?

It's a Memorial Day poem addressed to a fallen friend. John remembers his jokes, his quick soldier's eating, and an argument over a girl. He warns that clean abstractions like freedom and national interest become orders to fire, and says what we owe the fallen is to speak their names aloud.

This one is a poem, written for Memorial Day and addressed to a friend who did not return. John writes to him under the late-May maples, with charcoal smoke drifting from neighbors' yards and a song on a kitchen radio his friend would have known. He admits he barely knew the country his friend was sent to. He remembers the bad jokes, the way the man walked into a room as if it had been waiting, the soldier's habit of eating fast, and an argument over a girl, both of them wrong, laughed off over bad coffee the next morning. He calls the poem the coin left on the headstone. Then he turns to the abstractions: freedom, stability, the national interest. In the kitchen they sound like words. In the desert they're an order to fire. Be slow when you hear them, he writes. Hold up the face of someone you loved against the syllable. What remains is the small offering: saying a name aloud on an ordinary Tuesday.

Why it matters for leaders: Remembering the fallen means saying their names, and being slow to believe easy words when the next war is proposed.

Q: What does the poem say about wartime language?

A: That abstractions such as freedom, stability, and the national interest are not innocent; hold up a loved face against the word and watch what it does.

Q: What does the poem call itself?

A: The coin left on the friend's headstone, meant for the rain, the wind, and the earth to claim.

Read the full essay on Substack → https://heroespath.substack.com/p/memorial-daya-friend-who-did-not

By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation