Today the Mississippi Gulf Coast will pause for Veterans Day. This morning the Armed Forces Retirement Home on Beach Drive in Gulfport opens its doors at 9 a.m. Tonight at 5, Ocean Springs holds a candle lighting at the Mississippi Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Those are the right places to be.
I will be thinking about a hangar in the middle of a desert night, and about men and women whose work clothes had gone from white to black.
The night the fuels shop looked like a coal mine
I commanded the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron. We had been flying a routine combat operation from an island thousands of miles from home. After I landed from a combat sortie into Afghanistan, the command center called me in. The order was simple and sobering: launch three B-1s at once and lead them to a location on the Arabian Peninsula.
A day later I stood on a darkened ramp beneath my jet, about to board for a high-value target mission in the fight that followed September 11. It was the modern equivalent of the maximum-effort bomber operations you read about from World War II. Before I climbed in, I spoke with my senior noncommissioned officer, Master Sgt. Mike Miller, the best NCO I ever worked flying operations with. I told him to look after our people, especially the bomb loaders and the fuels troops.
That was not a one-time reminder. It became a daily conversation for two solid weeks. The flying was relentless. Exhaustion caught up with me. Mike would physically lift me in and out of the ejection seat so I could keep going.
When that operation ended, I asked him to take me to the fuels airmen, even though I was worn out from the last mission. They had been the hardest-working part of the team. Most had worked around the clock, with little sleep, for those two weeks. It was the middle of the night again when I arrived. The entire shop was there. Their normally white work coveralls were jet black. Even their skin was slick with fuel. They looked like coal miners.
I circled the room, shook each hand, and thanked them. I told them I was grateful for their service to the country. As I left to get briefed on the next phase, it hit me: everything I had ever learned about leadership, responsibility, and resilience was standing in that room, in the sands of the Middle East.
The men and women of the 9th delivered combat capability under those conditions without a single failure. I was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for combat leadership on that deployment. Truth be told, all of them should have received one, too. They did receive special recognition with a Commander-in-Chief's Award, and one of our aircrews was awarded the LeMay Trophy for the most outstanding bomber crew in the Air Force that year.
I told that story in my book because it is the part of war most speeches skip. The jet does not leave the chocks because a commander wills it to. It leaves because fuels troops, loaders, and maintainers do the unglamorous work until the mission is ready, and then they do it again a few hours later.
When the squadron came home, the families were waiting on the ramp under the aircraft. That is the other half of the same deployment, and it is worth remembering today, too.
The Coast already knows how to say thank you
Veterans Day remarks usually start with the pilots and the infantry at the tip of the spear. They should. I want the country to leave room in the same breath for the people who made those sorties possible and almost never get a parade of their own.
Down here, we know how to do that. On Saturday the Gulf Coast Veterans Parade rolled through D'Iberville, from Warrior Stadium to the Town Green. Parade President James Hollingsworth put it simply to WLOX. "It's really about the veterans," he said. "They're the ones that have given us this 250 years of freedom and they really need to be recognized." The Department of Veterans Affairs has designated the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a regional Veterans Day site for 15 consecutive years.
On Friday evening I introduced the Victory Belles at Waveland's America 250 celebration. On Sunday I gave the keynote at the Knights of Columbus veterans celebration in Waveland.
That tradition is why today's calendar matters. The open house in Gulfport is for the veterans who live among us. The candle lighting in Ocean Springs is for the names on those walls, and for the families who still carry them. If you can get to either one, go. Take a child. Shake a hand.
If you see someone who kept aircraft flying, or ships sailing, or trucks moving when the work was dangerous and the hours were ugly, tell them you know the difference they made. The photograph is usually of the person in the flight gear. The victory often belonged to the ones whose coveralls turned black.
A country that remembers only the cockpit will eventually find it cannot launch. Remember the whole crew. Today is the day to say it out loud.
Sources
- WLOX, "LIST: Veterans Day events and celebrations happening across the Coast" (updated Nov. 6, 2026): https://www.wlox.com/2026/10/22/list-veterans-day-events-celebrations-happening-across-coast/
- WLOX, "Gulf Coast Veterans Parade rolls through D’Iberville" (Nov. 7, 2026): https://www.wlox.com/2026/11/08/gulf-coast-veterans-parade-rolls-through-diberville/
- Gulf Coast Veterans Parade, "About Us" (2026 parade in D'Iberville; VA regional-site designation): https://www.msveteransparade.org/about
- Col. Rob Maness (ret.), What You Can Do About It, Chapter 1, "Become Who You Are" (the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron maximum-effort operation, Master Sgt. Mike Miller, and the fuels-shop scene)
- Col. Rob Maness (ret.), on introducing the Victory Belles at Waveland's America 250 celebration (Nov. 6, 2026) and giving the keynote at the Knights of Columbus veterans celebration in Waveland (Nov. 8, 2026)
