Six veterans on the best way to honor Memorial Day

Memorial Day is a day dedicated to honoring those in the military who died in service to our country. I retired from the Air Force, and Memorial Day is hard for me. It’s a day dedicated to remembering friends who gave it all for this country in one of the most divisive wars in this nation’s history, the Vietnam War. It hurts to look back. Vietnam still shapes my views on our military and national security, our freedoms and the lives we enjoy on a daily basis.

I spend part of Memorial Day at an annual ceremony in Alexandria honoring city residents killed or missing in Vietnam. I get to read the name of an Air Force Academy classmate, Morgan Jefferson Donahue, during the ceremony. His airplane was lost in Laos in 1968. He’s still missing, despite tremendous efforts by the Defense Department to locate him...