At this Memorial Day, I will be thinking of what I learned about parents’ peculiar perspective on a son being killed in war. (Now, alas, it is also daughters.)

I made these observations while conducting literally scores of military funerals for KIAs, most during the Vietnam period. I learned more from those held in home towns around the country than at Arlington National Cemetery, where I was assigned as a chaplain. (The latter were usually a significant time after the death and less intimate.) I observed very much the same reaction in delivering death notifications to families. If not a pattern, it certainly was a frequent occurrence.

Most of the men were lower ranking, whether enlisted or commissioned, being the most vulnerable. They were young. Of the young, most had recently graduated from high school or college and were in what was actually their first real life experience.

Being young, most of the notifications I delivered were to parents, rather than wives.

Almost always, the parents wanted to show me pictures of their sons. Some were in school athletic uniforms and others at proud moments in their young lives, such as graduation. They told me the great and funny things their boys had done while growing up. Almost always, they told me how proud they were of their son being a soldier. And how proud he was to be a soldier and of his uniform and all for which it stood. “He left here a boy and came back a man,” several fathers put it.

The pictures showed the sons strong and healthy—magnificent young men of whom any parent would be proud. “He died for his country” was recited in almost sacred tones. They thought of the many ways other adolescents had ended their lives, and they were almost grateful for this.

Despite all this, do you know what were the most frequent words cried out upon hearing the news?

While most were young, others were in their forties and fifties. Not their wives, but their mothers who were brought in cried the same as mothers of the young. It made no difference as to the age at death, because it was the end for all—they cried the same. The proud recounting of their lives, now lost, came later after the initial adjustments began. (Fathers were typically solemn and speechless, unable to articulate their equal grief).

But as we gave the notification, and at later moments when the initial reactions returned to mind, the characteristic outburst of mothers spoke for the universality of motherhood. Mothers cry the same:

“My baby!”