The sirens have sounded already. The first last night at eight, when the traffic stopped on Highway 1 and the drivers stepped out and stood by their open doors. The second this morning at eleven, two long minutes of it, while children stood at their desks in school and soldiers stood at attention on bases from Eilat to the Hermon. Now it is the afternoon, and the families are at the graves. The cypress trees are still, the way cypress trees are still when something is asked of them. By nightfall, at Mount Herzl, the state ceremony will mark the passage from Yom HaZikaron into Yom HaAtzmaut, and the flags will climb back up the poles, and the country will pivot, as it always does, with the same abruptness that bewilders every foreigner, from mourning into independence. But for another few hours it is still the day of the dead.
It had to reach across the Atlantic to a cemetery in West Des Moines, Iowa, where twenty-year-old Sergeant Declan Coady is buried.
It has been a hard year to listen.
Since last Yom HaZikaron, one hundred seventy-four soldiers of the IDF have been buried beneath the small flags at Mount Herzl and in cemeteries from Metula to Be’er Sheva. Seventy-nine civilians have been added to the long roll of the murdered. The sirens were not memorial sirens then. They were the real ones. Over Tel Aviv in October, over Haifa in March, over the dormitory buildings where the girls were studying for their matriculation exams.
This year the silence had to reach further than it has ever reached before.
It had to reach across the Atlantic to a cemetery in West Des Moines, Iowa, where twenty-year-old Sergeant Declan Coady is buried. It had to reach to Winter Haven, Florida, where Captain Cody Khork’s family is learning to live in a house that is too quiet. It had to reach to Bellevue, Nebraska, and to White Bear Lake, Minnesota, where Sergeants First Class Noah Tietjens and Nicole Amor are mourned by children who no longer wait at the window. It had to reach to Indianola, Iowa, for Major Jeffrey O’Brien, and to Sacramento, California, for Chief Warrant Officer Robert Marzan. Six of them, reservists of the 103rd Sustainment Command out of Des Moines, were killed on the first of March at the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait, when an Iranian Shahed slipped the air defenses and found an unfortified tactical operations center with the lights on.
It had to reach to Glendale, Kentucky, for Sergeant Benjamin Pennington of the 1st Space Battalion, who was wounded that same morning at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and died a week later of his injuries. His flag-draped transfer case came off a C-17 at Dover on a day in March when the weather did not know it was supposed to be solemn.
And it had to reach to six airmen of the tanker fleet (Major John Klinner of Auburn, Alabama; Captain Ariana Savino of Covington, Washington; Technical Sergeant Ashley Pruitt of Bardstown, Kentucky, all of the 6th Air Refueling Wing out of MacDill; and Captain Seth Koval of Mooresville, Indiana, Captain Curtis Angst of Wilmington, Ohio, and Technical Sergeant Tyler Simmons of Columbus, Ohio, of the 121st Air Refueling Wing of the Ohio Air National Guard), whose KC-135 Stratotanker went down over western Iraq on the twelfth of March while flying a combat refueling mission. They had kept the fighters aloft. They had kept the fighters aloft all month.
Thirteen American service members have been killed in action in Operation Epic Fury. More than three hundred sixty have been wounded. They did not die in Israel’s uniform. But they died in Israel’s war, which had become, by the twenty-eighth of February, America’s war too. That is the thing the silence had to carry this year that it has not quite had to carry before.
We forget, most of us, that Americans have always been in this fight.
The first Marines in the Hymn were the Marines on the shores of Tripoli, sent by a young republic to stop the Barbary corsairs who were selling American sailors into slavery in North Africa. That was 1805. The banner that went up the pole at Derna was the first American flag raised in victory on a foreign continent. The men who carried it were not there for oil. They were there because a ransom had become a principle, and a principle had become a cause, and American boys had been kept in chains because their country was too young and too far to come for them. Until it wasn’t.
They were there because a ransom had become a principle, and a principle had become a cause, and American boys had been kept in chains because their country was too young and too far to come for them. Until it wasn’t.
The line runs from Derna to Beirut, where two hundred forty-one U.S. service members were killed in October 1983 by a suicide bomber whose ideology was the direct grandfather of the ayatollahs’ proxies. It runs from Khobar Towers to the Pentagon. From Fallujah to Abbottabad. From the hangar deck of the Cole to the rooftop in Kabul where the last C-17 lifted off. And it runs, too, through the olive groves of the Galilee, where a West Point colonel named David Marcus, “Mickey” to his men, fell on the tenth of June 1948, shot by a young Jewish sentry whose challenge he could not answer in Hebrew. The cease-fire took effect six hours later.
Marcus is buried at West Point. He is the only American soldier in that cemetery who was killed fighting under a foreign flag. The stone says: A Soldier for All Humanity. It has said so for seventy-eight years, and for seventy-eight years it has been true.
Some three thousand five hundred Machal volunteers followed him into that war, from dozens of countries. More than a hundred of them died. Many were American. Many were Jewish. All of them understood what Marcus understood, that a war for Israel’s existence was, in the deepest and most unfashionable sense, a war for the moral possibility of the West.
In the decades since, the cemeteries of Israel have kept adding stones that were born in Boston and Brooklyn and the Bronx. Alex Singer, killed in the hills of southern Lebanon on his twenty-fifth birthday in 1987, running toward his wounded commander. Michael Levin, killed in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Max Steinberg, killed in Gaza in 2014. Omer Balva, who flew home from Maryland after October 7 and was killed on the northern border by an anti-tank missile thirteen days later. The list is long, and its American graves are being tended this afternoon by Israeli children who have never met the mothers who still come every Yom HaZikaron with a jar to wash the stone.
What is different this year is that the American dead did not come as volunteers. They came in American uniforms, on American orders, under an American flag. Soldiers of the United States Army Reserve. Airmen of the tanker fleet. A space-brigade sergeant at an air base in the Saudi desert. They did not enlist to fight for the Jewish state. They enlisted to fight for their own. And then the war made them the same war.
Iran understood this before we did. For forty-seven years the slogan over the door in Tehran has been Death to America, Death to Israel, in that order, because the men who wrote it knew that the two deaths were one death. They were right about the arithmetic. They were wrong about the outcome. When the first wave of B-2s crossed into Iranian airspace on the night of the twenty-eighth, and the Israeli F-35s came in behind them, the regime’s equation finally balanced. But in the other direction. America was Israel. Israel was America. The trench was one trench.
For forty-seven years the slogan over the door in Tehran has been Death to America, Death to Israel, in that order, because the men who wrote it knew that the two deaths were one death.
And so when the siren climbed over Jerusalem this morning, it should have reached Des Moines. It should have reached Winter Haven, and Bardstown, and Sacramento, and the small Ohio towns where the tanker crews grew up. The state that was built on the memory of its dead owes a memory now to the dead of its ally. Not a footnote in a foreign-ministry statement. Not a wreath left by a junior consular officer at a Memorial Day barbecue in Herzliya. A name on a wall, somewhere it can be read. A flag on a grave, somewhere it can be seen. A minute of the same silence that Israel gives its own.
Because the American boy who was twenty years old at the Port of Shuaiba, who had the quiet courage of the Iowa Reserve and a mother at a kitchen table in West Des Moines, was standing in the same trench as the Israeli boy who fell in the Galilee in 1948, and the Israeli girl who fell last year south of Gaza.
They are in it together now. They have been in it together, in one form or another, since Tripoli. In a few hours the flags at Mount Herzl will climb back up the poles, and the country will pivot into its independence, and another year will begin on the long clock that Yom HaZikaron keeps. By the time that clock comes around again, the silence will have to be long enough to say so.
One minute, once a year, is not much to ask.
