Why They Died

By Brian Doyle

Every year on November tenth at 11.11 in the morning students at the University begin a vigil that will last all day and all night and all the next morning. They take turns standing silently by the broken brick wall that is the University’s apt memorial to the students and alumni who have been broken in America’s many wars. The vigil ends at 11.11 in the morning on November eleventh, when one war ended long ago.

Each student stands there for an hour and is then succeeded by another student. All the students standing mute witness day and night and day are cadets in the United States Army or the United States Air Force.

One year, when the cadets began their vigil, a second student appeared and stood vigil too. As each cadet came and went, he stayed. He was there all day and all night and into the next morning. He had been an Air Force cadet at the University but had come to the conclusion that wars are the result of stunted imaginations, and that moral evolution is crucial, and that human creativity is more powerful than rage and revenge.

The next morning, when the University’s Veterans’ Day ceremony began, he stood quietly in the crowd. The ceremony includes speeches and ritual gunfire and prayers and fighter jets arrowing and terrifying overhead.

When the ceremony was drawing to a close, and the last speaker was stepping away from the microphone, the young man suddenly walked briskly toward the microphone. People in the crowd stared. The Army and Air Force cadets rustled and bristled. There were imprecations and insinuations from the cadets. The crowd murmured and burbled. Several cadets leaped to their feet angrily to intercept the young man before he could reach the micro-phone, but before they moved much their commander, an Army colonel who had served in combat, spun on her heel and said to them in the coldest angriest commandingest voice I ever heard, Sit down. Don’t you understand? His right to speak is why our men and women died. Sit down and shut up and listen, and they sat down and shut up and listened, and so did I, and I’ve been trying to listen ever since.

Brian Doyle (bdoyle@up.edu) is the editor of this magazine and the author most recently of The Wet Engine, about “the muddle & mangle & music & miracle of hearts.”

The University’s Social Justice Program explores issues of war and peace and social justice throughout the world. Make a gift to this program in honor of the veterans who have helped ensure the freedoms of our country.