This Memorial Day, Better a Shield Than a Sword

Our heroes and their descendants deserve more than just our remembrance. Golden Dome is a beginning.

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by Rod D. Martin
May 26, 2025

Today is Memorial Day. So we should remember. We should be grateful. We should seek to make America the nation so many died to create and protect. And we should make their sacrifice count.

We should remember men like my 11th great-grandfather, Captain Thomas Graves. Graves was an early investor in the Virginia Company, years before the Jamestown colony was founded in 1607. He believed in what one of Elon Musk’s ancestors might have called “making England a multicontinental civilization”. He put his money where his mouth was, when the entire English colonial experience to date was the murdered settlement of Roanoke.

But money wasn’t enough for Graves. He put his own skin in the game, his and that of his family. He sailed to the new colony a captain, on just the third voyage to it, and defended it with his life for the…