USNA CLASS OF 1968 MEMORIAL SERVICE
MEMORIAL HALL, U. S. NAVAL ACADEMY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 2008
1230 WORDS / 10 MINUTES

Good morning, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak on behalf of all of us here today as we honor those of our class who have left us.

That number sadly grows with each passing year as time and circumstance catch up to us.

And I don’t have to tell this group that time and circumstance seem to be catching up to us pretty fast.

But here, in this Hall, this hall we have visited so many times throughout the course of our lives and careers, we have a chance – even if it is only in our hearts – to go back in time, to see old friends, to pay a call on those who fell in war, to ask ourselves “what might have been.”

And to tell ourselves we are lucky for all that was.

Indeed, it was here – only six months ago – when we paid tribute to Spence Dry by posthumously awarding him the Bronze Star.

Most of know Spence’s story – the last Navy SEAL to die in the Vietnam War, he was killed in a fall from a helicopter while trying to return to the submarine GRAYBACK after an aborted rescue mission.

His award was long overdue and richly deserved, and largely the result of the efforts of Gordy Peterson and Mike Slattery, classmates who made sure his story got told.

That’s what today is all about, I suppose. Making sure the stories are told.

Because each and every name on this wall has a story – is a story.

Each and every name represents a life cut short, a dream snuffed out, a grieving family.

Yet it also represents deeds well done, lives saved and honor preserved.

As the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, it is not the length of life that matters, but the depth of it.

And so it is the depth of life we come to celebrate, the depth and the reach of those we knew, those with whom we studied and sailed, those we fought alongside, and those we left in our wake.

We call them heroes – and they are – in every conceivable sense of the word.

But so, too, are we if we dare admit it.

We are heroes to those we mentored and led and taught, to those who still walk these halls and stroll that yard, to a nation which has come to be proud of its military again, to our Moms and Dads, our brothers and sisters, to our spouses, who made everything we accomplished possible, and to our sons and daughters, many of whom followed us into the profession of arms.

We fought a war, or two, or three, kept a fragile peace, built a better Navy and Marine Corps.

We defended a nation.

We made a difference, all of us.

Some of us stayed in the service. Some of us chose to serve elsewhere in boardrooms and classrooms and all manner of occupations.

But we never forgot who we were or where we came from.

We never forgot what this great institution did for us, how it molded us, how it made us more than friends, how it made us shipmates and leaders.

Most importantly, though, we never lost touch with each other or even with ourselves as individuals.

Those six classmates who fell in Vietnam, whose lives were not long but so very deep – Richard Howard Buzzell,
Phillip Spratt Clark, Jr., Melvin Spence Dry, James Dale Jones, David Matthew Thompson, and Theodore Russell Vivilacqua – they sit here with us now.

They share our laughter, feel our pain. This is their reunion, too, because if we are truthful, we know we couldn’t have made it this far without them.

We tell ourselves this morning that we are here for them, but really, they are here for us – and always have been.

You know, I get to spend a lot of time these days with young Sailors, Marines, Soldiers and Airmen. I was just this past week out aboard the LINCOLN, where I ran into a young aviator from the Class of 2005.

Here she was barely three years from graduation, and she’s bringing those planes aboard, and so enormously proud of the job she was doing and the chance she had been given to do it.

And it just speaks to the quality of the people in our armed forces today.

These men and women, and their families, are truly the best I’ve ever seen.

We were good back then – well, some of us were – but I have to tell you these troops of ours today are truly great.

I see it every day.

Like us, they are making a difference.

Like us, they are proud of what they are doing.

Like us, they are losing their friends and shipmates to hostile fire, and like us, they are making sure they never forget.

Indeed, there are twenty-six names on this wall of Academy graduates who have been killed in action since the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon was hit.

Among them are the "Lion of Fallujah,” Major Doug Zembiec and Second Lieutenant James "JP" Blecksmith, Class of 2003 – both killed in the Battle of Fallujah.

You will also find Navy Seal, Lieutenant Commander Erik Kristensen of the class of '95 up there, killed while conducting a daring rescue in Kunar Province in Afghanistan.

Another of them is Megan McClung, also Class of 1995.

Talk about a story.

Megan was a Marine Corps Public Affairs Officer, one of the best they say. She could talk her way out of or into just about anything.

Once, in high school, she was rejected from the boys’ weightlifting program, so she took her case to the school board and won.

Megan was also a gifted gymnast, triathlete and an avid runner.

In October 2006, while deployed to Ramadi with the First Marine Expeditionary Force, she organized a satellite marathon for Marines to coincide with the Marine Corps Marathon here at home.

It was dubbed the Marine Corps Marathon Forward, and it proved a resounding success.

More than 100 runners participated.

Megan herself took second place with a time of three hours, forty-four minutes and ten seconds.

It takes me longer than that to pass the PRT.

A co-organizer of the race called her “One who would work tirelessly for – and deeply care about – people she’d never met, finding ways to make their lives better. One hundred and eight runners gained a significant life experience thanks to her on that day in late October.”

Well, on a day in early December, while escorting reporters out to the field – one of them, in fact, was our good friend Ollie North – Megan was killed when a roadside bomb destroyed the vehicle she was riding in.

She was in the last month of her deployment, about to go home.

Now she rests in Section 60 at Arlington, alongside dozens of her comrades killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Deborah and I have been to her grave several times. At the bottom, beneath her name, etched there into the stone, is her mantra: “Be bold, be brief, be gone.”

Fitting words for a life lived so well.

Fitting words for us here today.

So, here’s to those we loved and lost, to those who were bold, whose lives were too brief, and who, though they be gone from our presence, will never be gone from our hearts.

Thank you.