There are some voices that are rarely heard from on Memorial Day. The families of Special Operators understand better than anyone the sacrifices that every member of their family makes in order to do their collective part to keep our country safe. We don’t often get a look inside their world. It’s often filled with the pain of loss.
Sometimes people do things that intensify that pain after a loved one is killed. There are people who choose to talk about it, and sadly, those who chose to make money by talking about it. They take it a step too far and overreach their area of knowledge, but they sell a lot of books. Some of these people claim that they will take the reader into the souls of America’s heroes, without so much as even talking to the people who knew these heroes best: their spouses. Some spouses of the fallen see it as a grotesque violation of trust if the person writing the book hasn’t even bothered to ask whether it’s OK to name the hero who would have preferred that his identity remain anonymous in order to keep his family safe.
I recently interviewed the Gold Star widow of a SEAL who was killed in action while serving his nation. I wouldn’t claim that her husband was a ‘friend’ of mine.’ I knew him and I knew that he had a great reputation as a SEAL and a patriot. He had been among the first SEALs to deploy after 9/11 and he was killed in 2011; a decade of demanding assignments. He didn’t take a break. He kept deploying. His family sacrificed without a break, too. He was a husband who couldn’t be there for the difficult day-to-day events that life brings. He was a father who missed the milestones his child achieved. His family worked hard to keep his name – and theirs – out of the media. But a former SEAL who chose to write a book named him, without even bothering to ask his widow before doing it.
In my role of bringing new voices to light, I told his widow that I would tell her story in her own words. I promised not to identify her in the process, to honor her wish to stay anonymous and therefore have more peace of mind about the safety of her family.
I began by asking her how she felt about what seems to be a trend – authors using the names of fallen SEALs in their books when that would have been the very last thing some of these guys would have ever wanted.
This is what she told me:
I would like to start by clarifying what a Gold Star Widow means.
We are the widows whose spouses died while serving this great country. We are the wives left behind to carry on the legacy of our warriors.
Let me get into how I feel about some of the “sheeple” earning their salary and taking care of their families based off of our families’ loss.
I've been fighting this disrespectful battle since the day I was notified of my husband’s death at my front door.
The “battle” includes things like; jewelry with our guys’ names on it (but it goes to fund something that none of us have anything to do with), artwork, books, articles, magazines, membership-based websites, movies, documentaries, apparel, Facebook fan pages, alcohol, athletic teams wearing their names on jerseys, weapons, coffee, memes, TV shows, Pinterest. I think you get the point.
Not all of these providers of information or products are bringing in income via the aforementioned, but they are out there, using our husband’s names without approval of the families nonetheless.
Nothing demolishes a good day like getting a picture of my husband along with a text that says, "Hey don't want to ruin your day, but did you see this?"
It’s become the story of my life, and it’s anything but respectful.
We, the warrior widows, were chosen as the PNOK (Primary Next of Kin) by our husbands for a reason. Our guys trusted us to do the right thing by them. It seems as of late, there is a community of authors who are ‘playing swords’ by seeing who can ‘one up’ the other with stories about the fallen members of our collective Gold Star community.
Of all the items I've seen with my husband’s name on it, I haven't been consulted on one. Not one. Many of the authors don’t even have their facts straight. They often list the wrong rank, sometimes they misspell my husband’s name. Sometimes they even use his name with the wrong picture.
Trying to keep up with it all made me feel like I’d sold my soul to the Internet. It is very difficult trying to stay on top of who is doing what with the names of our fallen. I wish there was a magical person that we could call and say, "Hey so and so is doing it again. I don’t feel good about it, it doesn't honor my husband’s wishes or how I want to carry on his legacy." The truth is...there isn't a magical person who does that.
Please understand that the families are the ones left behind and it's a completely different ballgame when children are involved. In this day and age of social media, whatever is put out to the world is there forever. My biggest fear is that a day will come when these children do Internet searches on their fathers. Do they really need to know operational details of what their Dad did when the children are at an age when they may not even fully understand the threat against our country? And are they learning it because a "fellow member of the brotherhood" felt a need to write a book and pad his own ego along with his wallet?
I'm a mom. I worry. I want my husband to be remembered in an accurate way by our own child, not in the way he is depicted via the Internet or via the products a company or organization slaps his name or picture on.
We live our lives by the silent warrior code, so there might be times where someone doesn't even know that one of these warriors has a wife and children left behind. In that case, I urge people to do your due diligence. Don’t assume you have the right to name names or call people ‘friends’ if you don’t even know whether they had a family.
This happened with a major TV network after my husband’s death. They used his name and an artistic portrait (with the wrong color eyes I might add) for one of their reality TV shows.
My husband hated reality TV.
How do you feel about the people from the SEAL Community who have named, talked about, or written about your late husband?
As far as fellow ‘brothers’ leveraging our loss for their personal gain, I think about what my husband would have said. I can hear him saying: "That guy never even made it here to work at this unit and here he is writing about it." When he was alive, he would just shake his head if he came across an article written about the things he’d done. It made him angry and sad.
Guys writing about events, breaking OPSEC, sometimes talking about ops they were never on in an effort to boost their own credentials and totally for personal gain, is a joke. One that the media often helps perpetuate because they treat every SEAL like he was the one who saved the world and that he has personal experience with everything he talks about. I wonder how many of them actually ask those tough questions.
What do you have to say to the 'paying public,' the people who receive this information?
As far as the average American... Don't be average, step up your game and be more critical of the information you get from television. Was the person who is telling you this story ever even there? Did they know the person they are talking or writing about? I would ask people to do this out of simple respect for the wounded and the fallen and their families.
They all deserve it. They’ve all earned it.
My most pressing concern when it comes to other people sharing our stories is safety. There are so many people crowding this space of storytelling about what the guys did and what the storyteller thinks they did, real or not.
I understand that Americans want to show respect, they want to know what these guys do, who they are, how they take risk, what they and their families sacrifice. I just ask that the families not be forgotten when thinking about these stories. They deserve a piece of your respect as well, even if that means not talking at all.
