Every year on Memorial Day, the nation stops to look at the numbers. We look at the names etched into black granite, or the small flags pushed into the grass of military cemeteries. But for those of us who lived through that era, the names aren’t just statistics. They are faces. They are specific moments frozen in time.
For me, Memorial Day always brings back a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1969.
I was just an 11-year-old boy, standing in a crowded serving line at a church Sunday potluck dinner at Emmanuel United Methodist Church. Standing right next to me was a young man from Eau Gallie named Reginald Sater. Reggie was about to deploy to Vietnam. I remember looking up at him and feeling incredibly small and deeply impressed. He stood tall in his neatly pressed Marine Corps uniform, looking so impossibly old, mature, and brave.
To an 11-year-old kid, he looked like a fully grown man. But looking back now, through the lens of a lifetime—after watching my own children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren grow—I realize the heartbreaking truth. Reggie wasn’t an old man. He was just a kid himself. He was nineteen years old, born the exact same year as my wife. He was a boy standing on the edge of a life he never got to live.
Weeks after that potluck, Private First Class Reginald Mark Sater was in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam. He was an artillery forward observer attached to Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines. On August 10, 1969, his unit came under heavy hostile rocket and mortar fire along a fiercely contested piece of ground known as Mutter’s Ridge, near the DMZ. Reggie was killed in action that day, alongside twenty of his fellow servicemen.
Just like that, the giant in the neatly pressed uniform was gone from our church community.
Someday, I hope to make it up to Washington, D.C., to stand in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I want to trace my fingers over Panel 20W, Line 125, where his name is permanently etched into the stone.
But until I can make that trip, I honor him from here. I don’t just remember the Marine who fell on Mutter’s Ridge; I remember the boy in the fellowship line who a little 11-year-old version of me looked up to on a warm Sunday afternoon in Brevard County.
We who survived got to grow old. We got to build families, watch the world turn, and carry the gray hair that comes with a long life. Reggie stayed nineteen forever.
This Memorial Day, please join me in remembering PFC Reginald Mark Sater. May we never forget the incredible weight carried by the young kids who gave up all of their tomorrows so we could have our todays.
Rest in peace, Reggie. You are not forgotten.
