As Americans prepare to honor fallen service members this Memorial Day weekend, Representative Aaron Márquez (D-AZ) stood before a crowd Thursday alongside fellow veterans, reading aloud the names of 13 service members killed since the start of the war in Iran, a conflict he called both reckless and unnecessary.
Rep. Márquez opened by honoring one of the first to fall. "Today I'm honoring Sergeant Declan J. Coady," he said. "He died on March 1, 2026, in the attack on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait."
Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa, was among six Army Reserve soldiers from a Des Moines-based unit killed that day. Also killed in that strike were:
- Capt. Cody A. Khork
- Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens
- Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor
- Maj. Jeffrey R. O'Brien
- Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert M. Marzan.
- Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, of Glendale, Kentucky, died a week later from injuries sustained in a separate attack in Saudi Arabia that same day.
Additionally, on March 12, six more service members perished when a U.S. refueling aircraft crashed over Iraq, among them:
- Maj. John A. Klinner
- Capt. Ariana G. Savino
- Tech. Sgt. Ashley B. Pruitt
- Capt. Seth R. Koval
- Capt. Curtis J. Angst
- Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons
Memorial Day Weekend Event
Márquez said the event, held with the organization Vets Forward, was deliberately timed. "Heading into Memorial Day weekend, we thought it was really important that we honor the lives of the 13 service members that have already died in this reckless war in Iran," he said.
He pushed back against the tendency to reduce casualties to statistics. "The death toll of war just becomes numbers that we see on the nightly news," Márquez continued, noting that one speaker observed the 13 fallen represented roughly the number of people you might invite to a backyard barbecue this holiday weekend.
Reflecting on the everyday conflict of economic pressures in Arizona, he added, "The cost at the gas pump, the cost in the grocery stores, are all tied to this reckless war in Iran," he said. "It's really time for this war to end."
He closed with a direct call to action: "It's important that the public call on our U.S. representatives, our U.S. senators, and the president to end this war, because it's really an unnecessary war and it's not doing anything to make America safer."
