Text & Photo: Julie Schwietert Collazo
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There’s the temptation to see Memorial Day as a sale day. As the day the pool opens for the summer season. As a day for a backyard BBQ.

If you’re not directly affected by the war–and by that, I mean, if you don’t have a loved one or close friend serving in the military or living with the physical or psychological wounds of a past war– it’s easy to see Memorial Day just as a much-needed day off of work.

It’s preferable, perhaps, to avoid thinking about the war, especially if you (like me) are liberal. And it’s easier still not to think about the people serving when you don’t know them personally, easier to think of service members as a group, and not as unique individuals with diverse backgrounds, political opinions, and aspirations.

Today, I’m thinking about the men I met last October when I visited the US naval base and joint task force detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Far from the gaze of Americans, isolated on an island that doesn’t want them and where most of them don’t want to be, beyond the reach of ordinary Americans to know, see, and talk with them, the service members who are at Guantanamo have largely been cast as a group of bad guys and have little–if any–opportunity to contest that characterization publicly.

Yet as I sat with the men at meals and interviewed them at length, what struck me–and humbled me–over and over again, was how unique each person was. This one wanted to visit “Cuba proper.” That one thought the US immigration policy is unfair and inadequate. This one was a poet. That one wanted to be a professor. Few, if any, of the men I met fit any of the stereotypes we like to foist upon service members.

You can read more about the men’s stories on my travel blog. And while you’re BBQ’ing or swimming, or just enjoying the day off, take a second to think about the people who serve in the military. Whether we agree with the war or we don’t (and I don’t), every man and woman fighting is someone with a dream, a political opinion, and a past that might surprise you.