Photo gallery: Kerr County’s Memorial Day observance

Two Marines and a century’s worth of sacrifice anchored Monday morning’s Kerr County Memorial Day Program at the courthouse war memorial, where a crowd gathered under a late-May sky to hear the names of the county’s combat dead read aloud and to listen to a Vietnam veteran reckon, after more than 50 years, with a friend he never stopped missing.

The ceremony was led by Kerrville City Councilmember Jeff Harris, a Marine veteran, and Kerr County Precinct 3 Commissioner Jeff Holt, a retired Marine colonel. Holt opened with a reading of “In Flanders Fields,” the World War I poem that has anchored Memorial Day observances for more than a century, its imagery of poppies and torches passed between the living and the dead as resonant on Monday as when it was written.