Service and self-sacrifice I’ve shared before a tale about the first Memorial Day in 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, a remembrance of “slavery’s terrible legacy.” The focus of that ceremony and of most on Memorial Days since is on the fallen. Less featured are the stories of those left behind. The Fayetteville Observer ran an op-ed a few days ago by Rebekah Sanderlin. She calls out Donald Trump for his dismissal of soldiers who fell in battle in Europe as “suckers and losers.” She spotlights the burdens borne by the wives of U.S. soldiers lost in Afghanistan thirteen years before Trump’s snubbing: I started leading Care Teams in 2005, only we didn’t call them that then. We didn’t call them anything back then. We just helped. We, military spouses, showed up after the soldiers in dress uniforms notified someone just like us that the person she loved most in this world was never coming home. As the wife of an enlisted U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who spent more time deployed than home, my husband’s friends were the ones dying, and my friends were their widows. Sometimes we were there to simply be a friend to a woman who didn’t have any friends nearby, but mostly we quietly did all the little things life requires of people, things people can’t do when they’re in shock and grieving. Because most military families live far from their hometowns, they rarely have a local network to lean on during a tragedy. We became their…