Why these Gold Star spouses want you to pause before sharing a viral meme with killed troops
It’s not the first time that a viral military meme has brought up negative feelings for a Gold Star spouse. (Cpl. Jad Sleima/Marine Corps)
A Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Marine spouse lost her first husband in a helicopter crash on March 10, 2015.
Staff Sgt. Liam A. Flynn was one of seven Marine Forces Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, Marines killed when their UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida during a training exercise.
But it was the first weekend in August that the cellphone of Gold Star spouse Destiny Flynn Draher wouldn’t stop buzzing.
A viral meme intending to make a point about the claimed lack of national media coverage of a recent Marine Corps training accident — one involving an amphibious assault vehicle, or AAV, sinking off the coast of California and nine troops presumed dead — was misleading viewers by using photos of the Marines actually killed in 2015, including a photo of Draher’s late husband.
“When the AAV story initially came out my heart hurt thinking about the lives lost, then to think about the families at home, their journey of pain, loss and grief,” she said.
It brought up past wounds “to see how ‘social media’ wants to be the first to break a story even at the expense of past families and the current ones,” she told The Spouse Angle in a text message Sunday night.
The post says, “The whole country would be in mourning if this had been some football team that got killed in a plane crash but it was your true heroes that died in an accident aboard a landing craft,” referring to the Marine Corps accident that took place off the coast of Southern California on Thursday evening.
The problem was, as the post was going viral, the names of the Marines killed in Thursday’s mishap hadn’t yet been identified by the Marine Corps, nor had their photos been released.
This screenshot of a Sunday post on Sid Miller’s Facebook page shows the photos of Marines killed in 2015. (Facebook screenshot)
The discrepancy could have been solved by a simple Google search; the photo collage of the seven Marines killed in 2015 was used in many news articles at the time of the incident.
Though maybe shared with many good intentions of supporting U.S. troops, at least for this Gold Star spouse, it brought the pain right back.
The post was shared on the Facebook page of Sid Miller, the Republican Texas commissioner of agriculture who has more than 863,000 Facebook followers. The post garnered more than 34,000 likes, 45,000 shares and 9,500 comments.
A message to Miller’s Facebook inbox was not responded to before publication of this article.
It’s not the first time that a viral military meme has brought up negative feelings for a Gold Star spouse.
A touching photo of Army widow Seana Arrechaga kneeling next to her husband’s casket and seeing his body for the first time after he was killed in Afghanistan in 2011 later made it to the meme circuit in a few different posts.
One, in 2018, was connected to the hot and divisive topic of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem with the text, “To all the overpaid kneelers in the NFL: Put on this uniform, then you might understand why we stand.”
Arrechaga told Navy Times in 2018 that it was very painful to see her late husband’s photo used to “push political opinions.”
One of her biggest concerns was how to explain the use of the viral image to her then 10-year-old son.
“He’s going to be able to see these things and I’m going to have to explain all of it, why is his dad a meme,” she told Navy Times. “I think people forget that.”
“I had a lot of people telling me my opinions are wrong, when I’m staring at a picture of me and my deceased husband in a casket,” Arrechaga told the outlet. “What a world we live in, with all our keyboard warriors.”
“We can’t stop them from creating memes, but we don’t have to share it,” she said.