Memorial Day isn’t about a long weekend and BBQs. It’s about honoring those who gave their lives in defense of America…and it’s about supporting the families they left behind. Across US Army Special Operations Command remembering the legacy and impact of the fallen is a daily duty.
This Memorial Day, Fran Racioppi sat down with Major General Gil Ferguson and Dalia Munoz to share the story of the day that changed, and intertwined, their lives forever. The day SFC Pedro Munoz, Dalia’s dad, was killed in action. General Ferguson was the officer charged with informing her and her family of his death. Delivering a message no one wants to receive and no one wants to give. Dalia, her mother and her grandmother have never been the same.
In this emotional tribute, Dalia and General Ferguson recount that grief-stricken January morning; the planning and preparation behind the casualty affairs process; and the shock, disbelief and sadness that suddenly overcomes a family.
Regulation says the casualty officer and the family shall never meet again; which was the case until General Ferguson became the USASOC Chief of Staff, a role that put him in charge of the Protocol office, the office in which Dalia worked. Confronted with the biggest leadership challenge of his career, General Ferguson had to decide if, and how, to tell Dalia about their encounter years earlier.
This episode is about service. It’s about leadership when it matters most. And it’s about what it means to live a life shaped by loss, and still find purpose on the other side. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s one to never forget.
Special thanks to General Ferguson and Dalia for their openness and willingness to share the rare bond they hold. Thanks to the USASOC Historian’s office for hosting us.
The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by University of Health & Performance, providing our Veterans world-class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs.
Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
—
—
Memorial Day isn’t just about the long weekend and the barbecues. It’s about honoring those who gave their lives in Defense of America, and it’s about supporting the families they left behind. Across the US Army Special Operations Command, remembering the legacy and impact of the fallen is a daily duty. This Memorial Day, I sat down with Major General Gil Ferguson and Dalia Munoz to share the story of the day that changed and intertwined their lives forever, the day Sergeant 1st Class Pedro Munoz, Dahlia’s dad, was killed in action.
General Ferguson was the officer charged with informing her and her family of his death, delivering a message no one wants to receive and no one wants to give. Dalia, her mother and her grandmother have never been the same. In this emotional tribute, Dalia and General Ferguson recount that grief-stricken January morning, the planning and preparation behind the Casualty Affairs process and the shock, disbelief and sadness that suddenly overcomes a family. Regulation says the casualty officer and the family shall never meet again, which was the case until General Ferguson became the USASOC Chief of Staff, a role that put him in charge of the Protocol Office, the office in which Dalia worked.
Confronted with the biggest leadership challenge of his career, General Ferguson had to decide if and how to tell Dalia about their encounter years earlier. This episode is about service. It’s about leadership when it matters most, and it’s about what it means to live a life shaped by loss and still find purpose on the other side. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s one I’ll never forget.
Special thanks to General Ferguson and Dalia for their openness and their willingness to share the rare bond they hold. Thanks to the USASOC Historians Office for hosting us. The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by the University of Health and Performance, providing our veterans with world-class education and training, fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs. Follow The Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform. Read on our website and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show you why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
—
General Ferguson, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thanks for having us.
Great to be here again.
Again. Yes. He is a regular on the show. First time for you. We’re at USASOC. Shout out to the Historian’s Office, Troy Sacquety and his team. They’ve been telling us for about a year and a half or so that this place existed. We had to come down here. We had to do something in the studio. I appreciate them turning on short notice to get us in here and getting this set up for us. Incredible spot. When you go outside this room, which you don’t see here, but we’ve got the Indiana Jones room when you walk in. A whole lot of stuff.
Our kids’ stuff is like fifteen feet that way.
There’s stuff everywhere in there doing such a good job of capturing the history of everything that USASOC’s doing across all the different units of action and continues to do so. You just came from the Memorial Day ceremony outside the USASOC headquarters. We’ve got Memorial Day coming up here in a couple of days. That’s really the day that America remembers and honors all of those who’ve lost their life in defense of our nation and the protection of all that we love as Americans.
Special Forces have a lion’s share of the load in GWOT, but really since inception decades ago, and we’re going to have a chance after this to sit down with Troy and his team to talk about the inception of the Green Beret and John F. Kennedy’s legacy in making that a permanent staple of our national defense strategy. Every person who has served in USASOC has been affected by someone whom we remember on Memorial Day.
No group has been unscathed. We’ve lost 1,247 names that sit on the wall at USASOC of those that we have lost in combat and training and all the different various units that are associated with the command. We’ve lost over 200 in GWOT itself over the last 20-plus years. Can you take for just a second, General Ferguson, and talk about the importance of Memorial Day and what it means to the regiment?
Yeah, I’m happy to. One of the things that we talk about a lot, we’re at a little bit of a different point, and I think that’s why this is so timely, but for so long, we had, year after year, which unfortunately, we lost people every year. We had plenty of people, you touched on this in the formation, that knew those folks. They were teammates with them. They grew up with them in the formation. They knew them personally.
We’re getting to the point now where there are organizations where they have fallen members of their organization, that there’s no one left in that unit that knows them. There may still be people on active service, but they’ve gone on to a different assignment, that type of thing. We’ll circle back to this later on in the episode. Memorial Day, obviously, as a national holiday, started out as Decoration Day years ago. I won’t go too much down the historian road since Troy’s in here and he’ll check my homework if I mess anything up.
The day is, as you said, an opportunity for us to stop and honor the fallen and take a moment to remember them. Here’s what I talk about to the formation. It requires a deliberate effort to remember. It’s easy. I’m not saying it’s easy emotionally, but it’s simple when you know the people that you’ve lost to remember them because you worked alongside them, you knew them. That’s simple but it takes a deliberate effort to remember folks once there’s no one else in the formation that personally knew them.
Memorial Day is an opportunity for us to stop and honor the fallen and take a moment to remember them.
If you drive around Fort Bragg, there are street after street, building after building named after people. Womack Army Hospital is a great one. I ask people all the time, “Who’s Womack Army Hospital named after?” In the center of that hospital, there is a large, very well-done display that pays tribute to Private Womack and his actions and why that hospital is named after him.
Memorial Day gives us a time to reinforce that message, that the formations got to dig into their history and hold on to these names and make a deliberate effort throughout the formation to understand who these folks were and to remember them. That’s really what it is to me. It’s a great day to honor who we are as a nation, the folks that have gone before and paid the ultimate price and sacrifice so that we can have the opportunities that we do.
It’s also a reminder to me within our service, especially within our formation, to think about who came well before, long before. If you live on Fort Bragg, what street do you live on? Why is it named after either that person or that place? I don’t even know the right word for it, but it’s a very compelling, evocative event for me as a member of this formation.
Memorial Day affects all of us in different ways. We all have different ties to it. I want to go to the night of January 1st, January 2nd, 2005, which was a night that changed both of your worlds and forever tied you together. 1st Battalion 7th Group is deployed to Afghanistan. 3rd Battalion, 7th Group is deployed to South America and you, sir, are the Commander of HHC back here at Fort Benning, North Carolina. About 9:00 at night, you got a phone call.
Really, just routine combat operations in Afghanistan, 1st battalion. Obviously, teams spread out all over working for the CJSOTF over there. It was a seventh group, CJSOTF at the time. Jeff Waddell was the group commander. I ended up working for him just a few months later when I went forward to work in the CJSOTF. Yeah, routine operation, so to speak.
Unfortunately, things just didn’t go perfectly, like they unfortunately do sometimes. Pedro ended up being mortally wounded. As they were working through the casualty evacuation process, he died before they were able to get him back to care. That was the nature of his wounds. That’s really the short version, I guess, of what happened.
You get the call that Dalia’s dad has been killed in action. Now you have to bring everybody together to make the plan.
Obviously, the group is in contact. They’re talking behind the scenes, and obviously, there’s an official notification process, and there are certain gates that the Army requires for all of the right reasons that have to be met before you proceed. You can start leaning forward, so we started to do that. We brought individuals together at the group headquarters. As I mentioned earlier, Jim Miller was the group XO. As he brought us together, we started to work through who needed to be on the notification team. Obviously, I was the designated notification officer. I’d been through the training and was as prepared as anybody can ever be for that.
The Army does a good job preparing people for what they tell you is going to be a task for which it is impossible to actually really prepare. Notification officer, we needed a chaplain. We took an 18 Delta. We took a medic as well, just in case there were any medical contingencies. I don’t remember how many different vehicles we went in, but I think we went in 3 or 4 vehicles. We spent hours that night, so probably around 21:00. I remember it was wintertime. It was dark when I got the call and so I get into the group headquarters, and we worked for several hours there at the group headquarters, putting the plan together.
The Army does such a good job of preparing people for what they tell you is going to be a task for which it is impossible to actually really prepare.
As I mentioned earlier, Jim Miller was very concerned about, “This is a no fail mission. We can’t mess this up.” There is a time standard, so to speak, because this is 2005. This is really before social media had exploded, but we’re well within the 24-hour news cycle. There are journalist embeds all over the combat zones, not to mention not a whole lot of cell phones. I think I still had like a Nokia at the time.
There was enough capability to communicate that, and especially with the 24-hour news cycle, the concern was that we’ve got to notify before the word gets on the street, either through media or some other medium. I remember having the conversation about what time we were actually going to do this. I remember thinking that it was difficult to think about knocking on someone’s door at 6:30 in the morning to deliver this news.
However, the Army spends a tremendous amount of time studying all of this and figuring out what the window needs to be. There’s a reason to do it that early in the morning because you don’t want somebody who’s an early riser waking up and turning on CNN or some other news source early in the morning and finding out there’s a casualty. The next thing you know, there are people calling around and there’s speculation. That can just make things worse.
You’re doing it because even though it’s not necessarily going to be easy on the family, it’s not going to be easy on the family anytime. That was one of the things that I remember. I had to come to grips with it a little bit. I just did not really envision it. I’m a Major. I’ve been to the C&O training, but I’d never done this before. I had to come to grips with why that was the right thing to do. It was absolutely the right thing to do but it wasn’t easy, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
We did all of this detailed planning about how we were going to execute this, and who needed to be in the notification party, and even the sequencing. We got into the details of I am the notifying officer. I have to execute the notification. That’s my job. What happens immediately after that, that’s where the role of the chaplain came in. I’ll come back to that when we get a little bit farther down the road, because I’ll be interested to hear your take, Dalia, on that.
We put the team together, we figured out who we needed. We figured out how many vehicles we needed. There is the not easy task of determining is the family actually there, because if you show up at 6:30 AM to knock on the door, and the family’s taking a spur-of-the-moment vacation, as families often do, “Let’s get out of here for the weekend.” It’s January 1st. How do you determine that the family’s actually there without giving away why you’re asking whether or not the family’s actually there?
I do not recall how we made that determination, but I do know that we knew that the family was going to be there. We went out, and just like you, we treated this absolutely as a tactical operation. We went out in the vehicles with the drivers that we were going to have with everyone in the notification team who would be there.
It was a full mission profile rehearsal. We looked at maps and figured out, “Where should we stage?” We figured out there was a grocery store parking lot that we could stage in within about five minutes of the house. It was probably the last 45 seconds into the neighborhood. We drove that route without going up to the house and giving away where we would actually be going. We even did enough detailed analysis to figure out, “If we turn around here, we’re only 45 seconds or 20 seconds away from the house, but there’s enough traffic on this road that it’s not going to raise a signature if we’re driving there.”
This is 1:00 in the morning when we’re rehearsing this. We went through all of those rehearsals, and then we probably rehearsed it 3 or 4 times. I remember doing it over and over again to make sure we had everything right and that no weird lights were going to catch us, or what lights we would have to run if they did catch us at 6:00 in the morning, that kind of thing.
I went back home and got my uniform ready and then we all met back at the headquarters and got together and got in the cars. We went to that parking lot, and we staged. We waited until the time to leave. Again, we had timed this down to the second, and we drove away, and we got up to the house, and I got out and walked to the front door and rang the doorbell.
Dalia, you and your mom were inside the house.
Also, my grandma and my little dog, as you said, sleeping.
What happened when the doorbell rang?
I heard the doorbell. I’m sixteen at the time, so I’m sleeping. My mom, I guess, went to go check the door. I know that she told me that she looked through the window instead of the peephole, and she saw two men in uniform.
Tim was behind me but I had to do the notification.
I don’t know. I think the front door may have opened, but I remember waking up to sobs, like screams.
That was your grandmother.
I thought it was my mom.
It was your grandmother. She answered the door.
See? There are those things. We never talked about these things. You’ll see this going back and forth and learning as we’re going. I just know I heard the screaming, and so I got up out of bed to go check. I know that my mom was curled up. She didn’t open the storm door. I was the one, I think, that opened the storm door to let you guys in, and it was like an oddly polite experience, I guess I would say. You have a script you have to say. It’s like whatever it was that you said, you can come back to that. I know that they asked if they could come in, and I said, “Sure.” I opened the door, and from there, I guess I would just call it, it’s game on, like it’s official.
What did you say?
I rang the doorbell. The first thing I remember is the dog going bananas. The dog went bananas. Your grandmother came to the door and she opened it, and she was heartbroken. I just remember her saying no over and over again. I asked to come in, and at that point, you have to go in. You have to make the notification, that’s the job. As you said, I came in initially and I think Tim probably hung back at the door. I know he wasn’t with me for the actual notification. That’s the notification officer’s responsibility.
There’s another part to that that we can touch on in a minute. Your grandmother, again, kept saying no over and over again. I came in the house, and your mother, I remember, as I recall, you came in the front door, and then there was a family room off to the right. There was a sofa, as I recall, probably 15, 20 feet into the room. The first thing I have to do is identify myself and make sure that I’m talking to Pedro’s wife, your mama. I did that. I don’t remember. She definitely acknowledged that that’s who she was. She began to protest that there was a mistake.
I remember her saying, “I just talked to him. I just talked to him yesterday.” I had to tell her, “There’s no mistake.” I said the script, I repeated the script, which is the notification script that the Army gives you, which is similar at a funeral when you’re presenting the flag kind of thing. There’s a script, like you said. I delivered the message to her and that was it, then I leave. That’s the routine, so to speak. Routine sounds like the wrong word. That’s the system. That’s the process.
You deliver the message as the notification officer. In our words, you get off the X and I don’t remember anything else your mother said, because just like they tell you in the training, it doesn’t matter how much you prepare, you’re not prepared. Every one of them would be different. I’m sure every family’s going to react differently. Obviously, it’s a crushing moment for everyone. Crushing to be the deliverer of the news pales in comparison to be the recipients of the news.
This is what I remember. As I left the room, the chaplain went to your mother, and I would’ve thought that they’d known each other for twenty years. I just remember thinking, “If a chaplain isn’t good at anything else, but he’s good at that, that’s all that matters.” I remember he embraced your mother. I was walking out as all of this was happening. It’s a very brief memory, but it’s very clear.
I remember being so thankful for that. Later, I told my boss who was deployed down to Colombia at the time. I can’t remember if I got on the phone with him or what, but I said, “Sir, that guy’s one in a million.” I went outside, and we can come back to when you and I had a chat. I don’t think you even remembered when I told you.
Not initially, yeah.
I was out of the house at that point.
The chaplain comes in, spends some time with your mom. What’s going through your mind?
All of that becomes a blur because it is so traumatic. You have to understand, as we’re doing this, there are things that are starting to come through, because there were a lot of tears. It was crying. When he says that about the chaplain, I do remember there being like a lull. There was a quiet that ended up happening. It’s surreal because we did just talk to him. He called us before he went out on the mission. It’s New Year’s Eve.
We’re at a friend’s house. I had grown up in this whole world, and so this was normal. He’s gone. This is what we’re used to, and he comes back home. The idea of things in the world are real, his job is actually real now, everything that you think you’ve known is completely shattered. You’re starting to figure that out.
The Army does such a good job of preparing people for what they tell you is going to be a task for which it is impossible to actually really prepare.
I’m an only child, so there’s no one else. My grandma doesn’t speak English, so he didn’t say that, but that’s why. When I was a kid, my dad always told me, “When I’m gone, it’s you and your mom,” and probably like a little mini long tabber. He’s like, “Learn to use your senses. Check the perimeter before you go to bed. You know your mom forgets to lock the door. Check the things, have her back,” like all of that. For much of my life, I was a half adult as opposed to a kid. At that point, she is shattered. You don’t have room anymore to not pick up where you need to. I followed you out into the porch because I needed to make sense of everything, and I needed a moment. I don’t remember your face.
You came out. It’s a blur for me, too. I have the memory, the clear memory of Tim connecting with your mother and how thankful I was for that. I came out of the house and I don’t remember how soon it was after I walked out. It probably wasn’t very long. We weren’t at the house for a very long time. Obviously, it stretched out in the moment, but you came out and the one thing I remember you saying was you said it already. “It doesn’t seem real. I don’t really know how to feel right now.”
I’m sure that whatever I said at the time was not memorable. It was probably something along the lines of, “However you feel is how you feel. You’re not supposed to know.” I probably was thinking, “Yeah, that makes two of us.” I just remember you sat there on the little front stoop. We had that moment. I left and I didn’t see you for seventeen years.
When you’re talking about this whole thing being a mission, you leave and within minutes, another vehicle’s coming up with my mom’s best friend at the time. She’s coming up because she’s basically, I guess, been picked up.
She got a phone call. As soon as I knocked on your door, she got a phone call. Really, as soon as we delivered the message that the notification was complete, she got a phone call. That was another part of the preparation was. That’s why here’s unsolicited announcement for the formation. That’s why keeping your paperwork updated is so important. In this case, we knew who we could call because it said on the paperwork, “If anything happens to my husband, this is who you need to call. These are all their numbers. These are the people that, wherever they are on planet Earth, will drop everything they’re doing and come to my house.”
That’s the message to the formation. Keep that paperwork updated, because in this case, it was exactly what we needed. I didn’t have anything to do with that. That was the folks who were back at the headquarters. I’m sure somebody in the notification team with me, as soon as I came out, I probably gave them a thumbs up and said, “Okay, it’s done.” They made the phone call.
She pulled in right away. That set of comfort came through the door. At that point, I know, and like you said, there are no timestamps on this. You have no idea. We are with the chaplain and my mom’s friend. I know that I stepped away. I had this boyfriend in high school and my best friend, because I was supposed to start school the next day.
It was a Sunday morning.
We were supposed to come back after Christmas break. I called my high school boyfriend at the time, and his mom answers the phone and she was a nurse over at Robinson Clinic. She’s like, “Hi, honey. How are you?” I said, “My dad died. I don’t know.” She was like, “I will have him call you right back.” She hangs up the phone and I called my best friend and I go, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to go to school tomorrow. Can you help me with my homework?” He said, “Okay, what happened?” I guess he ends up telling his dad. All of these things start coming together. It’s not until probably midday that then I get to meet our casualty assistance officer that is with us lockstep. To this day, I still hear from him.
Talk about your dad.
My dad, Pedro Munoz, was a Sergeant 1st Class on 724 at the time. I always knew him as an Echo. I recently found out he was also Fox. I didn’t know that. He grew up in 3rd group, basically, and I knew that. He went to the Golden Knights from about tryouts in around ‘97. That was his break from Special Forces. He was a very avid skydiver and loved it. He was like, “I think I just want to jump for a little while,” so he did that. If anything sums him up, it’s how he went back to the 7th group. On 9/11, he was hiking the Appalachian Trail with a friend. Someone on the trail asked them if they had heard about what had happened.
They told them all about it. My dad was able to make a phone call to my mom and ask her if it was true and it was. That was when he decided to come back to Special Forces because he says that he just knew that things were changing in the environment, the world and his job, and that he needed to go back to where he’s a Green Beret. That was his greatest passion. He was super fit. Extremely fit. If you know anybody who knows my dad, they will tell you he was maxing out everything in the youngest age group.
He was the oldest one on the team. They called him Papi. He was super nurturing. He lived with two-a-days. He would road bike to work in the mornings. He would go back home, eat breakfast and then he would drive back to work, then do a gym workout, come home, and then decompress on a run, and then walk with my mom around the neighborhood. He was just wild. He was great. He was 6’1” tall. He was fit, he was funny. Very serious.
He took everything very seriously and just believed that you only get one shot at things that you’re doing, and so you have to do them well. He was a perfectionist. A terrible mechanic. He thought he was a mechanic, and he had a new hobby of some athletic thing always. For a while, he was a boxer. He had his road bike. He had different things all the time. I just knew when he walked through the door at home, all of that went out the window and he was just with my mom and with me. He just was like, “Okay, this is my time with my girls.” I just thought he was like the professor. I used to ask him if he could make radios out of coconuts, like I remember these things.
Gilligan’s Island. You probably need to make that reference.
Yes. I grew up as a kid, we’re still doing Morse code and he had the books that are the Morse code tapes. We would ride around in his Mustang and he would put them in, and you would just hear the dots and the dits. We couldn’t even go for a family drive to ice cream without hearing Morse code. Training, always. That was just who he was. He was from Puerto Rico and he was a runaway. The Army was what changed his life. He went in a little late and he loved it. He said it saved him.
Loss affects all us in different ways. When we lose a special operator, anyone who we care about, who we know, our loved ones, we travel through these stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. How did you and your family move through these stages of grief throughout the years?
I would say my mom had the freedom to go through the typical cycle of that, so she did. She went through every single emotion, through the anger, through all of that. Still, there’s an inherent sadness from the loss of what could have been. In my case, it was different as a kid. When people are coming and you’re in the middle of this grieving, they’re like, “You’re a child. You’ll get back to life. You have a whole life ahead of yourself.”
She is obviously experiencing this whole other loss. There was a difference in how people even handled us as far as our grieving. I never felt like there was room for a long time to have that space to grieve. I also believed for a long time that if I was angry, what was I supposed to be angry at? The Army? No, this thing gives me my life. This is what housed us. My dad loved this institution. I can’t be angry at that. I’m maybe dishonoring his feelings and his legacy. Am I angry at him? How could I be angry at him?
Anger’s always been one of the ones that I’ve had a difficult time with. As we become therapized in life, we know that anger is a secondary emotion. It really comes from the pain and the loss and all of those other feelings that you go through. I didn’t go through a lot of that for a long time. I had to finish high school, and I had prom a few months later, and then I was applying to college. It didn’t come out until several years later where I had the space away from being home at Fort Bragg and was finding myself in adulthood where I went to therapy and realized everything I thought that was normal might not have been, but it was mine. We had to work through a lot of that. All of that’s there.
As we become therapized in life, we know that anger is a secondary emotion. It really comes from the pain and the loss and all of those other feelings that you go through.
The families deal with it in one way, but on our Special Forces teams, these guys are our brothers and we spend oftentimes more time with them than we do our families. You tell your story, my daughter’s 15 right now and I think back to my time in 10th Group, my daughter was 4. I’d been home like eighteen months. The amount of time that I had spent on my detachment, they were my family. They suffer the loss as well on the team, within the company, within the battalion, the group.
We’ve lost individuals who’ve been iconic in our groups that have affected the entire group for years because even in SF have supermen, because we know not all SF guys are created equal. Some of those set the example that we all look up to within our own formations. Sir, when you look at your command at every level, you’ve had to experience the loss of our operators at all the different levels within the organization, how do our guys handle it on the teams? Oftentimes, we’re asking them to go back to work in a couple of days.
We were just at the Rose laying at 3rd Group yesterday and they’ve got a motto. “Care for the wounded, honor the fallen and continue mission.” That’s a great way to capture it, I would say. At this point, unfortunately, every senior leader in the Army has seen the entire spectrum probably of how units end up dealing with this. Some handle it better than others. The units, what we strive for is to do exactly what that 3rd group phrase encapsulates, which is to recognize the loss, to honor the individual, the family themselves, to honor the service, to honor the contributions that they’ve made to the organization, to the formation, to the Army, to the nation.
“Care for the wounded, honor the fall and continue mission.”
Honor all of those things and then recognize that there is a third step, and that is to continue moving forward. Now, you’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it. There are individuals that, because of certain circumstances, feel more of a responsibility potentially for what happened. “If I had only done this, maybe that wouldn’t have happened. If I had pushed back about doing the operation we were doing and maybe done a done things a different way.”
“If I hadn’t gotten wounded on the operation the day before, then he wouldn’t have been out there. It would’ve been me instead.” Those are exceptionally difficult circumstances for people to deal with. I don’t have the answers for those. That’s why we have so many great resources, both inside and outside of the service, to help our people through that. The healing process on a team in any small organization, any unit, if you look at what the Army does, that’s why we have memorial services.
The memorial services are supposed to be a time for the formation to come together. Not Memorial Day, but I mean the memorial service. That’s supposed to be a time for the formation to come together and grieve together and share memories and share thoughts. The best ones of those often get somewhat raw. People talk about their frustrations or where they think they’ve failed.
It’s a place to reveal, inside the formation, the challenges and concerns that people have so that they can heal as a formation and can move on to that next step, which is to continue that mission. This is where leadership matters on an organization, especially when you’re in combat. Whether it’s a platoon or all the way up to the highest in formations we have in the Department of Defense, the leadership matters.
The leadership has to be able to understand how to give the formation the room and the space to grieve, but also how to channel that grief into the next step, which is the requirement to potentially go back out the door the next day. You can go back, you can read John Plaster’s book about how the guys how they grieved, how they came together to do that. You see it in probably any history of any fighting formation over the years, what they did to move forward.
The reason I emphasize the leadership is because there is a balance. There has to be time to grieve. There has to be room and space to do that, but then there’s got to be an appreciation that we have to set that aside for now, for the moment so that we can move forward and execute. What can’t happen, though, is that you continue to suppress it over time and continue to just focus on the mission. You’ve got to have that time and space. I think we’ve learned some good lessons there over the years. Some of the lessons, we’ve learned the hard way. I could go on but I’ll stop because it looks like you got another question.
There has to be time to grieve. There has to be room and space to do that, but then there’s got to be an appreciation that we have to set that aside for now so we can move forward and execute.
I do want to add on to that as someone that works within the formation. I’m still very close to a lot of my dad’s teammates. I can see the evolution of the support and how we’ve moved that along. It’s gotten way better. I know many years ago, we didn’t have a lot of those supports in place for them. You can see how the grieving is experienced when they aren’t able to release that completely. I’m proud of that.
You didn’t see each other for seventeen years and then General Ferguson came to First Special Forces command in 2022 and realized shortly after being there that you worked there and remembered that day. Sir, talk for a second about what’d you do?
Do you want me to get into how it all transpired?
Yeah.
He comes up to the headquarters and we start working together. It was early. I don’t even think it was fall yet. It was probably late summer. We’re probably talking September of 2022. I’d gotten back from Iraq in July, came to work in August, probably a month or so later, maybe six weeks.I’d seen Dahlia in the headquarters, because she was on our protocol team there. Their office is on the third floor, right down the hall from where we are. I would see her frequently, almost every day, probably, that I was in the headquarters.
Jimmy and I had gone down to 7th Group for a function. I think we were meeting some folks from the office of the Secretary of the Army down there. I don’t know if we were waiting to leave. We had a little bit of time. He’s like, “Sir, you need to come check out the Rock Garden.” We go over there to 1st Battalion and we’re looking at it and we’re walking down the Memorial stones and whatnot.
I see the one for Pedro. I’m like, “Yeah, Jimmy, I did the notification when Pedro got killed.” Jimmy says, “Sir, you know, Dalia in our protocol office, that’s his daughter.” This is another moment that I can’t articulate to you exactly what went through my mind, other than it was a bewildering moment because, again, I hadn’t seen her in seventeen years. What I do remember is that very rapidly, we went into a crisis action planning about, “How do we deal with this?”
I don’t remember how long we talked about it. I went home, I told Renee, she was like, “Oh my gosh,” because I mean, she had met you by then and so we were trying to figure out what to do. The dilemma I had was I didn’t want her to find out from somebody else, but I also knew how painful it was going to be, probably, very likely, for us to have that conversation. Jimmy and I went back and forth, and I don’t remember what Jimmy finally recommended. I don’t remember what he recommended, just to give him credit because he we didn’t know what the right answer was, but I just felt like she couldn’t find out from somebody else. Finally, we decided that I needed to tell her.
Did you know?
No.
You weren’t looking at name tapes?
No, I don’t remember.
You probably didn’t have gray hair back then.
Definitely no. I know. Not as dapper. I’m still very tied into 7th Group, especially 1st Battalion. I probably go there once a year. The Rock Garden that he’s talking about was my senior project that I did. I was this kid. I wanted people to never forget. I had a senior project I had to do. We etched these stones. Mr. Bill Dicks, who just recently passed away, was my mentor. We do this. I have a ceremony for it, and all these stones go down to 7th Group when they move to Florida. Somehow, 1st Battalion has just owned this thing. It set off all these individual unit memorials that we see now. They’re probably better looking than mine. They’re really nice.
This was just my gift to them, really to myself. I had only hoped that they would love it as much as they have come to love it and embrace it. Jimmy gives me no warning. I had met Jimmy a year before with another friend of mine at lunch, on another visit down there. Even though he said he had seen me and we had talked to Renee and everything, I hadn’t officially fully had a personal conversation with General Ferguson at this point. He’s moving in and traveling, doing these battlefield battle rotations, looking around.
I said, “Sir, I haven’t properly introduced myself to you. I’m Dalia Munoz, I’m the Deputy Protocol here.” He goes, “Yeah, nice to meet you. I don’t think it’s the first time we’ve met.” I said, “I do all the socials and everything, so I imagine you’ve been to General Brennan’s house or know something, anything.” He goes, “How about you come into my office?” I agreed. Normally, when that happens, it’s because someone has a story about my dad. I’m prepared for I’m going to hear something about my dad. That’s normal. That’s typical.
He’s like, “Have a seat.” I said, “Okay.” He did a little bit of a ramble and says, “I’ve really gone back and forth with this. I talked to Jimmy. I don’t know. I don’t want to catch you cold, but I really don’t want anyone else to tell you,” which I’m wondering, “Who would’ve told me?” I always wonder that when you say that.
I’m like, “Who knew that? No one knew that.” He says, “I met you years ago. I was your notification officer when your dad passed away.” At that point, my mind is blown. It’s something I’ve wondered. I’ve always wondered who was at the door because our casualty assistance officer and my family were so close. I always wondered what the other parts to that story were. I’ve never done the work to find out. It wasn’t something I felt like I needed to really pursue.
For him to just toss that at me in the office and then I’m like, “I’ve wondered this a million times, but I didn’t expect to hear this from you today.” He tells me the story of the Rock Garden and all of that. I am overcome with a lot of emotions of this isn’t his fault, but I am facing the person who completely changed the trajectory of my life and that of my family’s, and it’s not his fault, yet again, I don’t know how to feel what I’m feeling. For about, I would say, the next month or two, we would exchange glances. I’m like, “Good morning, sir.” He’s like, “Good morning.” I’m like this face because I don’t know how I feel about it.
Did you want to kill Jimmy, too?
I did, yes. He goes over all of these things like talking about my dog and my grandma, and like, “What have you done and how is your mom?” All of these other little pieces of details that he knew, kind of on the wave tops, though. We talk about it and cry and do all of that. I step out of the office and Jimmy’s desk is at the end of the hallway and he’s standing there typing. I look at him and he looks at me and he goes, “I’m so sorry. We had to have a conversation.”
I would’ve appreciated a warning, I think. He told me that he had to have loyalty to you over me. I don’t pull the Gold Star card ever. My mom is a lady when it comes to that. We don’t do that. That was the one time I did tell him. I was like, “You cared to keep a general secret over that of a Gold Star family from 1-7. Shame on you, Jimmy. Shame.” We still joke about that, but it was really overwhelming and it was something that I didn’t even want to share. I didn’t tell my mom for a long time because I didn’t even know how she would handle knowing that I would see you, and not that she would remember either. I think that that’s just a whole other set of emotions that you humanize this other component of this very traumatic situation. I think probably 3 or 4 people have known in the last 3 years.
Have you since told your mom?
Yes, but you still haven’t seen her when she’s been here yet?
No, I have not.
She has been here and I haven’t made the effort to have that happen. I haven’t prevented it, but it’s a casual, “Hello, how’s it going,” is probably not the way it needs to happen. I don’t know how it needs to, and I think that’s where the kid in me is wanting to protect her in that way, because I don’t know what it would do to stages of grief again.
What has it done for you?
It definitely filled in another part of the story. It changed the dynamic of our relationship, for sure. I am extremely appreciative to know that. I couldn’t tell you. I think I’m still figuring that one out. I don’t know. You just don’t know. I think the coolest thing that it has done is that it gives me a touch point to this one moment.
One of the things, I think, is you live your life between. It’s like BC, like this is pre the death of my dad, the death of the life as I knew it, my mom, everything. Everybody changed. There’s this one piece of me that he has that no one else really has, because even my mom, I don’t think, would remember much of that day and all of that that happened.
The most poignant part was when General Ferguson said, “When you asked me you didn’t know how to feel.” I felt like that is so me. Even in that moment, I was still a piece of myself that I didn’t know I still had. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but I think I just was able to appreciate that I had this tiny little bit of strength still in that moment to say that. It is like this powerful thing because I do know that you gave me a hug before you left. I know that because when he said that conversation, I remembered that.
I think the greatest part now is that we do get to work together and see each other and have that many little bond. Now other people will know. We had this little secret for a while, and it was really special and it stayed on the third floor for Special Forces Command in an office where the two of us got to have that conversation. That I’ll never forget. I’ll forget a bunch of other pieces of that day, but I can’t forget that connection again with him.
You talked about being a Gold Star family. This is a club that nobody wants to be a part of. When you think about your experience as a Gold Star family, how has your interaction with other Gold Star families across the regiment helped you?
I would say yes, we are part of this elite club. Everybody wants to join. I think since I was older, since my dad was on a team and he was so much older than a lot of people, I have a very different perspective from people that had toddlers and small children that don’t maybe understand all of that point of view.
I’ve really been able to watch and see different families and how they handle it and really be a recipient also of a lot of support from all of these organizations that were around and be helpful towards other families. My work has always stayed within this community, whether on the nonprofit side or now as a DOD civilian. Being a Gold Star is complicated because it’s a title that comes along with a very heavy weight that you have to carry.
You’re carrying the name of this person that is now memorialized and people have a lot of feelings towards. They say no, but they do. They expect you to act a certain way. You can’t be too sad because then it’s so sad and you can’t be too okay because then they weren’t impacted. You’re constantly dealing with this juxtaposition of feelings and forces and people. You also are an extension of this person while other people are grieving. When we talk about teammates, when they see me, they see parts of my dad. They see maybe my snarky humor sometimes, it’s like him, or my little mole that he had one too. All of those things. You are also that vessel for them to connect to that memory.
It’s a lot. You get stories, you get the tears, you get that responsibility. Whether no one imposes it on you or not, you are bearing the grief and the life and your own life of this person, yours. When General Braga asks me during to speak at the wall on a day where there were tons of my dad’s old teammates and nonprofit organizations and things that had helped me, and he’s like, “Can you share your story,” I know that he’s coming from a really great place to share that, but now I have to make sure that I convey it the way that people hope I do.
It is not lost on me that there’s a great responsibility in being Pedro’s daughter. Maybe that’s kept me a little bit together, but it’s not easy, for sure. At the same time, it’s an honor and it comes with everything else. It does. This whole thing, it’s not just the service member. He talked about that. He said, “Service members don’t really get to where they get without also family.” Whether that’s positive or negative, if you have a negative situation that helps fuel you to be a great soldier or you have people uplifting you, this is a very symbiotic relationship.
You could have gone off and done anything in your life and nobody here would’ve faulted you or said anything. You chose to stay involved and really be a really important part of somebody who’s very well-known and respected across all levels of the regiment. Why not walk away? Why stay involved with the organization and be a part of USASOC and 1st Special Forces committee?
My first job out of college was with 3rd group and then I walked away and I’ve worked completely away from the organization. I moved back and applied to this protocol thing. I had done things like that. I said, “Okay, let’s do that. It’s at 1st Special Forces Command, okay.” I didn’t make a phone call. I just put in my application in USA Jobs, like a normal person.
I get this interview, I get hired, and I didn’t realize, I think, how much I belonged somewhere and that how a part of myself was missing when I’m away from it. When I’m away from it, I feel relief and I can just be who I am. I know service members talk about this all the time where they say, “When I’m away from it, I don’t completely feel like myself, like there’s a part of me that’s missing.”
That’s the same thing here. It’s almost like this totem where my personality and all of these things that I understand. The language that I use is also unique because of how I grew up and it belongs here. I think I’ve done okay. Here I am and I worked over at 1st Special Forces Command for two years and loved it. My favorite part was really connecting still with the CSUs at that level.
When we’re protocoling over there, you really get to go to the group level and support them and so you’re constantly having that interface and it’s awesome. Now at USASOC, it’s a different level where now, all of the people that I may have known in different ways are now at this level and that relationship where I run into my dad’s old colleagues and all of that happens. There’s still this constant touchpoint with my dad, with who I am and this community that never ends. I still get to see families. I love it most days.
You talked about the resources that are out there across the regiment for Gold Star families for our guys, our Green Berets and our special operators across all MOSs within the organization to help with mental health, with getting back as you said in that third phase, getting back to the mission. Just can you talk for a second about what are those resources that are across the organization that exists for everybody to leverage?
Yeah, I guess the way I would articulate it is we have a wide variety of behavioral health providers across the formation, whether that’s chaplains and the programs that they have. I was just sitting down with our chaplains talking about some marriage enrichment seminars. They have coming up some different programs, a wide variety of things that they offer for couples to get together.
That’s part of it, too. We talked earlier about the teams and the teams have to learn how to go forward as a team, but then the individuals with their individual lives, with their families and everything, they’ve got to be able to figure out how to go forward in that respect. Whether it’s those type of events where chaplains are putting on retreats for marriages, even if it’s just small things that I know we do things at the headquarters here in town, a night out where they’ll have twenty couples or so together and speak about different topics.
Whether it’s those, whether it’s the military and family life counselors, etc. The wide variety that you’ve got people within the are human performance and wellness programs, some of those are socoms, some of those are Army, but just across the broader Army, those programs are out there. I think more than anything we have to, and we do, I think what’s important, I guess is what I’m trying to say, is that individuals have a broad spectrum of opportunities for touch points with people that can help.
We know stories where somebody’s in the gym, somebody’s in a human performance center, they’re working out with a friend in the gym, they’re working out in one of our HP centers with some coaches, etc. They notice how everything’s going. They’ll pick up on cues, whatever. They’ll say, “Why don’t you go talk to so and so,” that type of thing.
The more we can have touchpoint with our folks, the better off we are because that gives our professionals more opportunities to see what may actually be happening. Of course, there’s a wide variety of benevolent organizations that provide services above and beyond what the DOD provides. Those are also extremely helpful.
The team nature, the cohesion continues after service. I know of an incident that occurred, it was the night of the USASOC Red and Black Ball. A friend of mine from a previous organization that I’d worked with called me. I looked down at my phone about five minutes later. I’m like, “Okay, why is he calling me?” He doesn’t live here locally. I texted him, I’m like, “What’s up? I’m at a function.” He said, “Give me a call,” and so I called him.
Anyway, individual that he knew that was part of an organization that I had been a part of earlier. All that just to say we made some connections. I called a few people, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a guy who was in that guy’s former organization who lived locally, who had gotten on the phone with several people and they were going to his house and on and on.
It’s the network. It’s maintaining those bonds even when you do move apart. Obviously, the interconnectedness we have now with cell phones and social media helps tremendously. What we try to do at the command is encourage and we see it across the formation at the command level. We try to encourage people to take advantage of the resources you have because there are a lot of resources and there are a lot of people that want to help.
Dalia, what’s your message on Memorial Day?
I would say that, first of all, one of the things I really want to say that people get confused, I think, is when they say Happy Memorial Day. I don’t think that’s one something to say. I think we forget what Memorial Day is really about, because it is the unofficial start of summer, and I love that. As we have this ceremony, we get to honor the people that deserve to be honored and also go into a weekend that is of celebration. We are memorializing and so you should absolutely have a beer. You should absolutely have a picnic and live life for those who aren’t able to anymore. I know in my case, my dad always was just like, “You’ve got to keep going.” He was so crude, he’d be like, “Suck it up, Dalia.”
You should absolutely have a beer. You should absolutely have a picnic and live life for those who aren’t able to anymore.
In that, he would want me to be happy and celebrate and still enjoy life because he gave his to the fullest in the way that he wanted to, even though it was cut short. As I go into this, I think everyone should absolutely remember someone that they can, especially within our community, and say that out loud. As long as we continue to remember people and laugh and share stories, Memorial weekend is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, and then we get to go into a season where hopefully we get to spend time with people that we care about doing the things we love to do.
I can’t sum it up better than that.
I hope you’re not going to ask me to, because I can’t either.
I just want to say thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you both for telling your story, for the commitment that you’ve had, not only to the organization, the regiment, our special operators, but sharing the sacrifice that so many have made on behalf of the rest of us. Also, the commitment that you have to each other. Special Operations Command, we live by the soft truth, number one, that people are more important than hardware. They sit at the center of everything we do. That becomes no more prominent than on Memorial Day. Thank you.
Thanks, Fran.
Green Beret Foundation
P.O. Box 25138
New York, NY 10087-5138
Note: Please use USPS mail or priority mail. Do not use FedEx.
Green Beret Foundation
10205 US Hwy 15-501, Unit 26-8
Southern Pines, NC 28387-4301
Call: at: (844) 287-7133
