Watch: Memorial Day -- When Grown Men Cry Freely

I asked Special Forces veteran Dave Alwine what Memorial Day meant to him. Tears filled his eyes and trickled down his face, right in the middle of the crowded visitor’s center at Arlington National Cemetery.

He responded, “That there has been — and will still continue to be — people that serve our country that are willing to put everything on the line to protect our way of life.”

On whether this Memorial Day was different than the last now that Afghanistan War is over, he took a deep breath.

“I try not to think too much about that, just because, you think, ‘Was it in vain?’ But it wasn’t, because they were doing what they wanted to do,” he said.

“Patriots, warriors. People who cared. They gave it all,” another Special Forces veteran, Moe Fortson, said.

On Saturday morning, Alwine, Fortson, and other members of the Special Forces Brotherhood Motorcycle Club’s Fort Bragg chapter, including retired and currently serving Special Forces, rode their motorcycles up from North Carolina to commemorate their fallen brothers at Arlington Cemetery, as they do every Memorial Day.

For these men, Memorial Day is a reminder of everything they and their closest friends were willing to give, or gave. It is a day where grown men can cry freely.

“It’s not a holiday for shopping sales and stuff. It’s to remember the people that provided the freedom that you have. That’s the biggest thing,” another Special Forces veteran added.

Chapter president Jaraan Little said he limits his visits at Arlington to four friends at a time, otherwise it would be too much. He personally knows 22 men buried at Arlington.

He said he picks friends to visit randomly, but there is something special about “Mo.” Army Sgt. Alfonso J. Molinar, or “Mo,” saved his life in Afghanistan in 2014.

Little, the team sergeant, was in an unarmored ATV along with his 18 Delta, or medic, in Zabul Province in southern Afghanistan, investigating where their outpost — known then as a “village stability platform” — was taking fire from. “We got rocketed every single day,” he said.

“One time we went investigating and there were a whole lot of enemy up there waiting on us — like 17 of them as a matter of fact,” he said. “They all opened up [with gunfire].”

They jumped out of the ATV and dove onto the ground, trying to take cover in a ditch no more than a foot deep.

“I thought I was dead. Me and my team Delta jumped on the ground. This ATV had no cover. We were both laying down, laying face down on the ground,” he said. “I looked over at Shane and said, ‘This is it, buddy. I think we’re done.'”

They couldn’t hear the shots firing, they could only hear the hundreds of bullets whizzing by their heads — “zoop zoop zoop zoop!” “It was an unbelievable amount of gunfire,” he said.

He said they had no radio communications, and couldn’t call for back up. Their humvee was so shot-up, it was completely destroyed.

Then, out of nowhere, Mo and another Green Beret, Sergeant First Class Lynard Jones, came charging in an unarmored humvee. They drove up and Mo unleashed a barrage of gunfire at the 17 insurgents, taking out four of them and forcing the others to flee.

They didn’t stop there, pursuing them until they were gone. “[Mo] did have a mini-gun, so he had a pretty good advantage,” Little chuckled.

He said he had told Mo earlier that day not to put a mini-gun on a humvee. “That’s insane. It’s not a tank, it’s not a helicopter. I mean, it’s a humvee,” he chuckled. “And that mini-gun saved my life.”

“There’s no logical reason why I’m not dead,” he said.

Mo would survive that day. But back home a couple of months later, Little was laid up in the hospital after a bad motorcycle accident when he got the news about Mo.

“I was laid up and all busted up. About a month or two in, they were like, ‘Hey, sorry to tell you.’ When they said it to me, I couldn’t even understand it,” he said. “I still haven’t gotten over it.”

“That man drove into a hail of gunfire,” he said. “And Mo just sacrificed himself and drove right into that crap. That’s why I’m still here.”

Mo left behind a fiancé, Lee, who visited his grave just last week, away from the fanfare of Memorial Day.

Not all of their friends died in war.

Another friend, Sgt. Maj. Willie Lubbers, tragically died while he was on a Veterans Day parade float that got stuck on train tracks in the path of an oncoming train.

“Amazing [Special Forces] dude,” Little said. “He was a really, really good friend of mine. Wasn’t a gunfight. … He threw his wife to safety.”

Although the Afghanistan War is over — Special Forces are still deployed all around the world, in places most Americans have never even heard of, they said.

“For guys like us, it’s never over…We’re still in places that things are happening,” Fortson said.

Little, who deployed 10 times to Afghanistan, is still thinking about his friends left behind in the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“I still got friends there. They’re Afghan. … Some of those people were in gunfights standing right next to me, trading bullets with al-Qaeda and ISIS. And they got left,” he said.

“You know all the Afghans that got out of there? … Ninety percent of those were not people that helped America. They were just people who wanted to get out of that country, that’s all it was. And some of them could have been terrorists, who knows who they were. It was a horrible concept,” Little said.

Little said he worries about the direction the military is going in now — with its rush to embrace what critics have called wokeness.

He said the most important things for a soldier to learn is how to follow orders, how to fire a weapon straight, and staying in shape. “Those are the best soldiers in the world,” he said.

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