By Jeff Kenney Citizen editor
Culver Academies graduate and US Army Major Ryan Mayfield wanted his Veterans Day audience to realize each of them have “what it takes” to make the most important sacrifices for their family, their community, and their country.
And, Mayfield told Academies students, faculty, and guests, it’s because “our strength comes from God.”

Mayfield, a 1994 Culver Military Academy graduate and son of Summer Schools and Camps Director Tony Mayfield (himself a 1965 CMA grad) and Academic Skills Center director Sherri Mayfield, has served three tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and is currently stationed at Nellis Air Force Base as part of an Army Joint Support Team. But he cited some of Culver’s long-held traditions as helping him – in more youthful days – contemplate the meaning of sacrifice, from the 83 names of CMA’s World War I veterans enshrined in the Legion Memorial Building in front of which Mayfield spoke, to the scores of fallen Culver men from other wars listed in the Memorial Chapel, to the 198 Culver alums currently serving in the armed forces.
“Culver offers you the opportunity to learn and sacrifice,” Mayfield told the student body, reminding them of the meaning behind the longstanding Culver tradition of saluting the gold star honoring fallen Culver veterans outside the Legion building and encouraging them to remember this Culver Veteran’s Day ceremony, one of the school’s most cherished and longstanding traditions. The solemnity and significance of the occasion was heightened, also, by the fresh memory of the previous week’s massacre of service men and women at Fort Hood, Texas, as Mayfield told his audience.
“Most of us,” he noted, “don’t know what it’s like not to have the freedoms we exercise every day.” He added one in three Americans is either a veteran or a member of a veteran’s family.
Mayfield asked those assembled to ask themselves “for what commitment are you willing to serve and to sacrifice?” though he stressed listeners not to assume failure and diminish the value of their sacrifices if they don’t result in “the ultimate sacrifice.”
“For most of us, military or civilian,” he added, “our sacrifice will likely not be publicly recognized,” but instead will be made on behalf of those nearest to us on a regular basis. Mayfield concluded his address by invoking God’s strength as the source of each person’s ability to sacrifice. “Greater love hath no man than this,” Mayfield quoted the apostle John, “than to lay down his life for his friends.”

The Academies’ Veterans Day ceremony has remained largely unchanged since its 1924 inception, launched to recognize the sacrifices of American and Allied soldiers during World War I at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.