In the dark hours Wednesday morning as the sun slowly rose over the horizon in Waimanalo, soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division’s 21st Regiment and cadets from University of Hawaii’s Reserve Officer Training Corps tested themselves to the limits, training in remembrance of fallen soldiers who had come before — including one born and raised on Oahu.
Soldiers ran from the Honolulu Polo Club to Bellows Beach, stopping at stations along the way testing their skills, fitness and ability to work as a team. The annual competition marks the anniversary of the death of 1st Lt. Nainoa Hoe, an officer in the 21st regiment and a UH ROTC graduate who was cut down by a sniper’s bullet during the 2005 battle for Mosul in Iraq.
His brother, 1st Sgt. Nakoa Hoe — who serves as a reservist in the 100th Battalion, 442nd Infantry Regiment — joined the soldiers and cadets.
Several soldiers who served under Nainoa Hoe were also in attendance to watch — including one still serving and who just returned to the 25th as a senior enlisted leader.
Sgt. Maj. Stephen Siglock had been a soldier in Hoe’s platoon. He had served in the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment before moving to the 21st Infantry Regiment, but he said that Hoe was still among the best officers he served with.
“There couldn’t have been a better (platoon leader), and you can do everything right, and stuff can still go wrong, and the only way your unit is going to overcome it is by hard training,” he told the the soldiers and cadets after they returned from Bellows to the Polo Club. “Things go wrong. You gotta be ready for it, and that’s why we train.”
Hoe’s father, Allen Hoe, a prominent Hawaii attorney who himself served in the Army as a Vietnam draftee, addressed the assembled soldiers and asked if any of them were 20 or younger, observing that now — two decades after his son’s death — soldiers are serving that weren’t alive then.
“It’s been 20 years, but it seems like it’s yesterday,” Dan Pfeiffer said. He recalled that the day his comrade died, they weren’t planning on combat. They had been patrolling for hours on a rainy, miserable and uneventful day in the streets of Mosul and got orders to check on a medical clinic.
Jerome Roettgers, who had been one of the platoon’s radio operators, was next to Nainoa Hoe when he was struck by the bullet and carried him as he and fellow soldiers fought back and worked furiously to get medical attention for their leader. Joined by his wife and children, this was the first year Roettgers attended the commemoration.
“It’s hard to find the right words,” he said.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. military has deployed troops across the globe — from Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria and Somalia, among other countries to fight long, bloody wars.
Today, small numbers of U.S. troops are still deploying to several of those countries as their missions have morphed and evolved. But more two decades later, many of those who fought the fiercest battles in those wars are leaving the service, with fewer and fewer troops having firsthand experience with the brutal and gruesome realities of war.
The Pentagon has been gradually trying to shift attention from counterterrorism operations to confronting China in the Pacific. In 2021, the U.S. military ended its two-decade-long war in Afghanistan — which concluded with a chaotic withdrawal that included the death of 13 American service members and an unknown number of Afghan civilians.
President Donald Trump, who took office this week, has vowed to bring an end to other conflicts in order to focus on China and potentially launch military operations against Mexican drug cartels and other groups across Latin America.
First Sgt. Steven Edgmon, an Afghan War vet who now serves in the 21st Regiment and helped plan the memorial commemorations, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, “We’re getting less and less soldiers coming to us that have deployed. The ones that have experienced that, I think, have to instill that in our training, that intensity … to those training events and make sure that our soldiers treat it like it’s real.”
Allen Hoe addressed soldiers and showed them a tattered old American flag he and his unit carried with them through the jungles of Vietnam. During a vicious battle, 18 of his fellows soldiers — including his platoon leader — died when enemy forces overran their position.
He kept the flag to honor his fallen comrades. Decades later, his son Nainoa asked him if he could send it to Iraq so that the young officer and his platoon could carry it into battle to continue honoring them. Nainoa Hoe had it on him when he died.
Allen Hoe was among the last generation of American soldiers to be drafted before President Richard Nixon ended the draft amid the increasing unpopularity of the Vietnam War. Ever since, the U.S. military has depended on an all-volunteer force. Hoe said it’s often struck him that his sons chose to follow in his footsteps.
During a ceremony at Schofield Barracks on Wednesday afternoon, veterans and dignitaries gathered to remember Nainoa Hoe and 10 other members of the 21st Infantry Regiment who died in combat during deployments in support of the Global War on Terrorism.
“It simply breaks my heart when you meet a Gold Star family, and because you will immediately become aware and familiar of the gamut of emotions that have coursed through the families of these 11 young men, from proud, supportive to bitter, angry,” said Allen Hoe. “And yet, you know, each one of these heroes chose to do what they did for their country, their love of family and their love of their country.”
But after decades of relying on an all-volunteer force to fight America’s wars, the Pentagon has found it increasingly difficult to find new volunteers. Army rolls fell in 2022 by about 15,000 soldiers — or 25% — short of its 60,000 recruitment goal.
The military has relied on intergenerational military families like the Hoes. A study of recruiting demographics by the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation found that in 2003, Pacific Islanders, including Native Hawaiians, joined the U.S. Army at a rate 249% higher than the general U.S. population. The same study also found that wealthier Americans were as a group less likely to choose military service.
A 2015 survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics of Americans age 18 to 29 found that while 60% of people interviewed supported sending U.S. combat troops to fight ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria, 62% said they themselves would “definitely not” join the military, and another 23% said they would “probably not” sign up.
For those that America does send, the cost is very real — and heavy. And the memories of them last a lifetime.
Siglock said that in his 25 years in the Army, “I’ve had a lot of my own soldiers underneath me die, but in my life, I can still probably say (that was the) worst day of my life — Jan. 22, 2005.”
