Holly Higgins’s son Danny came home from his first deployment to Iraq on a sunny September afternoon. When he walked through the door, Holly almost didn’t recognize him. He looked the same, but he was carrying himself differently. He stood taller, calmer, quieter. He pulled out a three-by-five American flag and said, very quietly, “This is for you, Mom.” That was all. Holly set the flag on the buffet, next to a picture of him, and the two of them celebrated his homecoming.
Danny was Senior Airman Daniel J. Johnson, an Air Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician. EOD techs walk toward the bombs that everyone else has to run from. The bomb suits they wear weigh between eighty and a hundred pounds and are lined with armor that pushes the inside temperature up to a hundred and twenty degrees. EOD training teaches you, early, to subtract every ounce you can from your kit. One extra ounce of gear translates to a pound of perceived weight under the suit.
While Danny was deployed in Iraq, his good buddy, Technical Sergeant John Homer, found out that Danny had been strapping the flag to his chest, inside his bomb suit, on every call he was assigned. John pulled him aside. He had run the math. The flag weighed fourteen and a half ounces. That was fourteen and a half pounds of perceived weight Danny was adding to his suit, on top of everything else, every time he walked toward a bomb. Get a patch instead, John told him. Or a tattoo, like the one John pulled up his shirt to show him. Danny respectfully declined. He said he planned to keep wearing the flag on every mission he was assigned, and that when he came home, he was going to give it to his mom.
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About a year after Danny came home from Iraq, he was deployed again, this time to Afghanistan. He was newly married. This time, Danny didn’t come home. He was killed in October 2010, at twenty-two.
In the rush to leave for the funeral at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Holly stopped on her way out the door. She walked back inside, picked the flag up off the buffet, and pressed it against her chest. Holding the flag gave her some comfort. She held it the entire flight across the country. At the service, the story behind the flag finally came out.
The flag in her hands was the one Danny had worn inside his bomb suit through his Iraq deployment. In Afghanistan, he was wearing two. One in front, over his heart, for his mother. One in back, for his wife. Not because he had to, but because he chose to.
Holly has been carrying that flag for fifteen years now. She is a Gold Star mother. In the years since Danny’s death, she has spent her time helping other people learn how to tell their own stories. She works alongside Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret, with veterans, Gold Star families, first responders, and others. Her TEDx talk, “Discovering Hope in Loss,” has reached audiences all over the world.
Names can fade, Holly says, but stories stick.
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There are stories from the episode worth coming to first-hand. Holly tells about an afternoon when Danny knelt down beside her in the garden the week before he was sworn in, after she had spent the whole summer praying for the words to talk him out of it. The young man Holly didn’t recognize who came through the line at the funeral, who told her about the day Danny had crossed a football field at halftime to sit with him in the bleachers. Danny’s last call to his older brother came from Iraq, just after his older brother’s first child was born. The conversation Holly had with her husband Mike, in the car after an event, that gave her permission to mourn Danny before she tried to do anything else with her grief. And the gift Danny gave her on his last Christmas at home, the meaning of which only opened up to her over the years that followed.