A Memorial Day message from Dylan Allman
Fallen veterans don’t deserve honor. They deserve sympathy.
Every year, Memorial day rolls around and people perform the same ritual: flags, folded hands, hashtags.
They say “freedom isn’t free” and “they died for our country.” But that’s not what happened. Not really.
Most of the dead didn’t die defending anything—they died executing the interests of men in suits who never once tasted blood.
They died for empire. For oil. For geopolitical leverage. For lies. They died confused, scared, expendable.
And what they deserve isn’t romanticization—it’s mourning. Because they were used.
I was in the Army. I wore the uniform.
I memorized the creeds. I stood at attention in ceremonies so soaked in propaganda you’d think we were at mass.
I believed it at first. You have to. That’s the trick. The system runs on belief—on the idea that you’re part of something noble.
But you’re not. You’re inventory. You are fodder for machines, human lubricant in the gears of profit and control. And by the time you realize it, it’s already carved something out of you you’ll never get back.
Memorial Day is sold as sacred, but it’s just a laundering of conscience. The dead are paraded as heroes not to honor them—but to recruit more. It’s marketing through grief.
The state wraps its atrocities in the corpses of kids and calls it patriotism. But what they’re doing is grooming the next wave. Romanticizing sacrifice. Sanitizing war.
Making you believe that dying for a flag is a rite of passage rather than a tragedy of manipulation.
Don’t enlist. Ever. Don’t give them your body. Don’t give them your youth. Don’t give them your mind.
You will not come back the same—and some of you won’t come back at all. And for what?
You will not defend freedom. You will not protect the homeland. You will not do good. You will become a tool, pointed at strangers you’re ordered to see as threats, told to carry out missions you’ll never fully understand, for goals you’re not meant to question.
It’s all theater. And beneath that theater is a conveyor belt of broken lives, folded flags, unmarked graves, and medals pinned to mothers who would trade them all to have their son or daughter alive.
You want to honor the dead?
Stop feeding the machine that killed them.
Stop telling the next generation that it’s glorious.
It’s not. It’s a trap.
And I say this not as an outsider—but as someone who lived in it, breathed it, wore it.
I know what it feels like to be in the grip of that machinery.
And I’m telling you, from inside the scar: get out before it takes you too.
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