Kimberlee K.

In an unexpected turn of events, I have been watching a lot of World War II content.

It started with Band of Brothers, which initially aired on HBO but was recently released on Netflix. While making my way through the 10-part series, I have also intermittently watched movies based in WWII, like Hacksaw Ridge, Unbroken, and Saving Private Ryan.

There was one exception however, and it was on the day after Halloween, when I came home and found myself in the mood to watch Coco, an animated Disney movie that centers around Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. This holiday, observed largely in Mexican culture, involves friends and families building altars (or ofrendas) with pictures of lost loved ones in order to encourage their souls to cross over and visit. It is a day to celebrate, honor, and remember those that have passed away.

To be fair, Día de los Muertos is celebrated in the days after Halloween, so the idea to watch Coco wasn’t completely random, but I can’t imagine Coco and WWII are often spoken about simultaneously. That being said, I felt the two tie themselves together in my mind.

In Coco, a young boy named Miguel travels to the land of the dead in order to find his great-great grandfather. On his journey, he encounters a man who is denied the ability to cross over to the land of the living because his picture has not been placed on an ofrenda, which indicates that he is slowly being forgotten. He makes a deal with Miguel to help him find his great-great grandfather if Miguel will return to the land of the living with his picture, place it on an ofrenda, and thus allow him to cross over on Día de los Muertos.

In Band of Brothers, along with many of the other media on World War II, we hear stories of the soldiers that fought in the deadliest war of all time. We are introduced to individuals, to the people in the uniforms and the stories and backgrounds that made them unique. So often when we talk about war, we look at numbers, at timelines, at summaries, and in doing so individuals get clumped together, and deaths become data. But these stories remind us that each service member is and was a person. They tell stories of resilience and courage, of miraculous survival and heartbreaking loss. They teach us faces and names that become blurry in the credits of war, or that solely exist in the hearts of family members and the granite of gravestones.

Obviously, war is still very active in the world today, and there are individuals—soldiers and innocent civilians—being lost every day, their deaths clumped together with data. And with Veterans Day coming up this weekend, I have felt a pull to try and remember the individuals.  I have continued to watch the movies and television shows that tell their stories because I don’t want their sacrifices to ever be forgotten with time or glazed over with passing gratitude.

We all deserve to be remembered, and we all deserve to be known as people, not numbers.  

So I am holding those men and women close to my heart, and not just this week. I hope I can always have their sacrifices in the back of my mind, and that I will be endlessly open to hearing the stories of the individuals that have provided me the daily freedoms and privileges not available in all parts of the world. I want to think of the sons and husbands and brothers, the wives and sisters and daughters, who step into the line of fire, in all of their humanness, and fight to protect the innocent. I want to remember the individuals, each and every person, who has made the ultimate sacrifice, and who carry the burdens of loss and trauma with them every day.

I never want them to feel forgotten, or for their legacy to be nothing more than a statistic. I am grateful not for the numbers, not for the data, but for the individuals. Each and every vibrant person that has served.

Thank you, to our veterans.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We will always remember.