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- Van Barfoot and Charles Milam landed on the same beachhead during World War II. Barfoot became a war hero. Milam died, buried in a foreign grave as an unknown soldier. Memorial Day is for the Milams.
Van T. Barfoot was a farm boy from Leake County. He became one of the most decorated soldiers of the Second World War.
Barfoot landed on a beachhead in Anzio, Italy, 30 miles south of Rome, on January 22, 1944. The plan was to push north, break through heavily entrenched German lines and take Rome. A tactical error saw Allied forces pause on the beach while troops and supplies amassed, allowing the Germans time to form new lines encircling the beach. A four month-long brutal battle at Anzio ensued.
There were 43,000 Allied casualties.
Van T. Barfoot was not among them. He lived.
In June of 1944, in Salerno, Italy, Barfoot crawled through an enemy landmine by himself. He proceeded to take out three German machine gun nests. He confiscated a rocket launcher and disabled a tank column, as well. Barfoot is credited with 8 kills and 17 German soldiers captured that day. His platoon crossed the field safely due to his heroism.
When invited to return to America to receive a Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt, he declined to leave the field of battle. Instead, he received the medal while fighting in France. He went on to fight in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where he flew 177 hours of missions as an Army aviator.
Van Barfoot died at the age of 92 in 2012. Today he is remembered by a stretch of highway in Leake County and Fort Barfoot in Blackstone, Virginia.
A Less Heralded Sacrifice
There are no roads or forts named after Charles N. Milam. A Greenville native, Milam also landed on the beach in Anzio, Italy in late January 1944.
Two Mississippi boys. Transported half a world away from the clay of Leake County and the fertile soil of the Mississippi Delta. Standing on the same foreign beach, under the same foreign sky. Fighting the same battle. But that’s where their stories diverge.
What followed was a nightmare of artillery bombardment, trench warfare, and constant death. Soldiers described Anzio as a giant killing ground. There were few safe places. Shells fell day and night. Men disappeared in explosions, were buried hastily, or vanished altogether.
Amid the mud and terror and death of Anzio, Charles Milam disappeared into history.
On January 31, 1944, Milam was reported missing during heavy artillery fire. Fellow soldiers believed he had been killed, but his body was not recovered.
He was 20 years old.
At an age when most young men today are worrying about college, jobs, girlfriends, or where life might take them, Milam’s life simply stopped on a shattered beachhead thousands of miles from Mississippi.
There were no parades. No ceremonies. No speeches or commendations.
Rome was liberated. The war ended. The soldiers who survived Anzio came home and built lives.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Italy, Charles Milam lay buried as an unknown American soldier. Years became decades. Loved ones passed away.
In 2025, more than 80 years after his death, Milam’s remains were identified using modern scientific techniques. Mississippi brought one of its lost sons home. He was buried in a military cemetery in Newton.
There is something profoundly decent, but also haunting, about that. A soldier lost during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency finally returning to Mississippi. A young man frozen forever at age 20 finally receiving his name back after decades as an unknown. But as the pastor noted at the time of his burial, there was no family left to mourn or celebrate Milam’s homecoming.
Memorial Day is for the Milams
Van Barfoot survived long enough to become a hero. Charles Milam died quickly enough to become a tragic footnote.
And yet Memorial Day belongs especially to men like Milam.
Not because courage matters less than sacrifice, but because the dead depend on us to remember them. The heroes who survive can tell their own stories. The fallen cannot.
That is what Memorial Day asks of us.
Not simply patriotism. Not merely celebration. But remembrance.
Because Memorial Day is not ultimately about the glory of war. War is hell.
Memorial Day is about feeling the weight of interruption. The interrupted lives of young men who never became old men.
The interrupted futures of sons who never returned to Mississippi to marry, raise children, coach baseball, sit in church pews, or grow old alongside the people who loved them.
Mississippi understands this perhaps better than most places. Ours is a state with an unusually deep tradition of military service. Roughly 3,555 Mississippians died in World War II alone. Those numbers can feel abstract until you realize every one of them was somebody’s child. Every one of them had the potential to do or be more.
So pause today. Think about the men buried under white marble crosses overseas, about names etched in courthouse memorials you pass without a second glance.
Remembering the sacrifice of the dead is the least we can do.
