On Memorial Day 2025, Charlotte Brown of Rye High School won the annual John M. Kingery Memorial essay contest from American Legion Post 128. The Legion received 18 essay submissions on What Memorial Day Means to Me. Brown read her essay to the crowd assembled on the Rye village green.
Here is a video of Brown’s reading, and a copy of her essay What Memorial Day Means to Me:
What Memorial Day Means to Me
By: Charlotte Brown (Class of 2028 at Rye High School)
A soldier charging into the face of chaos. A medic stitching a wound through gunfire. A pilot shooting their last ammunition as their plane falls from the sky.
Nameless faces. So many nameless faces we will never identify. Yet, they are the reason we are standing here today. We are evidence. Living evidence of the millions of veterans who lived before us who sacrificed everything to have us standing here today. Their heroism lives on as we do.
But some faces are not nameless. Some of them were friends, family, ancestors decades back who aren’t here today. Yet, their stories are. And stories are what keep them alive. Stories we tell every year. On Memorial Day.
I have a few stories I’d like to share, from veterans who called Rye and the greater New York area their home.
Charles A. Batten was born in Rye on April 19th, 1896. He played the violin and sang in the choir. He once received a gold cross for four years of perfect attendance at Sunday School. A little less than a year after enlisting during WWI, Batten was killed in action on August 26th, 1918, near Arras, France after the Germans had been forced out of the city.
Ruth Landon was born in New York City, NY. She was killed by a shell fired on St Gervais Church in Paris, France, in March of 1918 as WWI continued to rage on. Winona Martin, YMCA Volunteer from Rockville Center, N.Y was also killed in a Paris air raid in March of that same year.
John Gerard McCarthy, born on February 6, 1921, lived on 41 Grapal St, the very same street where my family has lived for over ten years. John was an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. John was a pilot. He flew a P-1 Mustang and was stationed in Italy. He fought air battles in France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and many more nations until he was killed during a mission in Romania on August 4th, 1944.
And these are barely a fraction of the hundreds I was able to find.
To me, Memorial Day is about keeping the memories of those who aren’t here to tell them alive. Memorial Day is about cherishing these stories, cherishing the people who lived them, died them, and acknowledging those who never got a chance to tell their own. Because in the end, we live. And it’s our responsibility to keep history alive. To keep their sacrifices alive. To feel gratitude for the “little” freedoms we exercise everyday to the people who never got the chance to experience them.
So when you’re going to work, or school or just spending time with the people you love in the town you love, remember that we live for them. For the brave men and women who laid down their lives and fought for our country.
I ask you to seek out their stories. Seek out history. Our history. And live to tell their stories the next May, and the May after that.
Because that’s how heroes are truly honored.
