Memorial Day 2026 · In Remembrance
Today we honor the men and women who laid down their lives in service to the United States. Their sacrifice is the foundation of the freedoms we work within every day, and the moral compass that guides everything Honor Code Medical does.
Honor Code Medical was founded by veterans. The discipline, ethics, and life-saving skill that define military medicine are the foundation our company is built on. The Combat Medics, Hospital Corpsmen, Tactical Air Controllers, and military surgical teams who served alongside our founders shaped how we approach every clinical conversation, every product we distribute, and every relationship we build with healthcare providers.
Memorial Day is not a celebration of military service. It is the day America pauses to honor those who did not come home. The men and women whose names appear on the walls of national cemeteries, on the stones at Arlington, on the manifests of aircraft that flew into harm's way and never came back.
Their families carry their absence every day of the year. This weekend, the country pauses to carry it with them.
At HCMC, we honor that sacrifice by refusing to lower the standard. Every product we put in a clinician's hands meets the bar we learned in service: do no harm, do the work right, and never forget who you are serving.
Many of us at HCMC carry the names of family who served before us. The legacy of military service runs deep across our team — fathers, grandfathers, uncles, mentors. This Memorial Day, we honor them and the generations who answered the call.
The Tradition of the Red Poppy
In the spring of 1915, a Canadian Army surgeon named Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae watched red poppies push up from the broken earth of a battlefield cemetery in Flanders, Belgium. The bright blooms returning to ground torn apart by artillery moved him to write a short poem from the perspective of the men buried beneath them. The poem ran in the British magazine Punch later that year and quickly became one of the most enduring works to come out of the First World War.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Three years later, an American educator named Moina Michael read McCrae's poem in the Ladies' Home Journal, two days before the Armistice. She was on leave from the University of Georgia, training overseas relief workers for the YWCA in New York. The poem struck her deeply enough that she wrote her own response — “We Shall Keep Faith” — and vowed to always wear a red poppy in remembrance of the lives lost at Flanders. After the war, she began making and selling red silk poppies to fund support for returning veterans, and the practice spread. In the United States, the red poppy belongs to Memorial Day — the day we honor those who never came home — rather than Veterans Day, which honors all who served.
Our Military Heritage page tells the full story — the Combat Medics, Hospital Corpsmen, and Special Warfare medical lineage that shaped Honor Code Medical. The history of military medicine is the history of breakthroughs that became civilian standards of care.