On Saturday morning, Alison Malachowski sat in the grass before a headstone at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. She poured two shots of bourbon, one for herself and one for her son, Marine Staff Sgt. James Malachowski, and she began to cry.
Sergeant Malachowski died during a deployment to Afghanistan in 2011.
The 9/11 attacks had changed many young people’s lives, she said, and her son wanted to protect his country. So in 2003, he joined the Marines, who sent him to Iraq, then Afghanistan.
Ms. Malachowski, 65, said she was scared at first, but also proud of her son.
She showed a photo of her son in Afghanistan, standing with children. Everyone was smiling. It was taken not long before her son’s death, from an explosive device. “Everybody came back from the explosion, but why didn’t my Jimmy?” she asked.
She said that many parents had experienced terrible pain, and questioned the need for so much loss.
Then Ms. Malachowski pulled out small American flags and placed them near other graves — the graves of the children of other families she has met over the years.
In an adjacent section of the cemetery, Vanessa Calderon, 30, was thinking of her father, Army Sgt. First Class José Orlando Calderon Olmedo, who worked at the Pentagon.
On Sept. 11, 2001, he was scheduled to be off duty, but he told his family he was going in to cover for a colleague.
“I answered that if he doesn’t go to work, I won’t go to school,” said Ms. Calderon. The negotiating did not work. Sergeant Calderon Olmedo hugged her, kissed her forehead, told her to “Be somebody in life,” and added that he loved her. “I told him, ‘I love you, too,’ and then I went back to sleep,” Ms. Calderon recalled.
Now she and her brother are both studying criminal justice. “I want to be a police officer at the Pentagon,” she said.
Original