AUSTIN (KXAN) – Saturday, May 25, 2013, several thousand people are expected to gather at a Burnet County ranch to do a bit of walking. Some will walk just a mile or two, others up to 20 miles.

The hope, though, is to go as far as you possible can, and then a little more. The point is to “reclaim” the true meaning of Memorial Day. The idea is to “ Carry the Load .”

“You know,” said Kim Kelsall, 36, “Load Barer” or spokesperson for the event, “you see a million commercials on TV for mattress sales and furniture sales and car sales and that’s not what Memorial Day is about.

“It’s not about the sales. It’s about honoring the men and women who have given the very last measure of their lives for our country.

“And we honor first responders, as well, because while our soldiers are overseas fighting, our first responders are doing the same thing here on our streets and giving their lives to keep us safe.”

Kim Kelsall knows something about such people. Her brother was one of them.

“He was a pain in the butt like any younger brother would be,” she laughed. “I think he often took advantage of the fact that he had an older sister with a lot of friends around and kind of wanted to be in the mix. And I was often annoyed with that. You know, ‘Get out of my room!’

“We were only one year apart in school. So there was a lot of competitiveness. We both played the same sports. We both were excelling academically. So there was a lot of competition.

“And we would beat each other mercilessly. However, no one could touch him except for me. So we did have a few little squabbles at school when I felt someone might be picking on him. Then I got the brunt of it but no one was allowed to beat him up except for me.”

August 6, 2011, someone did beat Lieutenant Commander Kelsall and his sister was powerless to help. A suspected rocket propelled grenade took out a huge Chinook helicopter loaded with Navy Seals and other US and Afghan troops. Thirty Americans and eight Afghan commandos died in what remains the single deadliest day of the war for US military personnel.

The phone call

“I think my phone was on vibrate,” said Kelsall, “and it started vibrating somewhere around 5:00 in the morning. And I didn’t hear it until about 8:30 in the morning when I finally picked up. And it was my parents.

“And the first thing out of my mom’s mouth was, ‘Oh, my poor baby.’ And I knew. I just knew,” Kelsall said, her strong voice beginning to break a bit.

“And she couldn’t even finish telling me. My dad was on the phone, too, and he said, ‘Kim, I need to tell you something. We were trying to contact you before you saw it on the news. Jonas’s helicopter was shot down.’

“And I remember just sitting in bed. I don’t think I breathed for about five minutes. And I was, I was here in Austin. They’re in L.A. His wife, Victoria, was in D.C. at the time and I thought, ‘Where am I supposed to go? Where do I go?’

“I mean, Jonas is still in Afghanistan and there was no telling when he’d get home.

“So, I remember the first thing I said was, ‘Is this a joke? Are you sure?’

“Then I jumped on a plane and I went to L.A. to go be with them.”

There would be many plane rides in the next few weeks, as the family traveled around the country attending funeral and memorial services for her brother’s fallen comrades. The travel offered ample time to remember.

The memories

“I went away to college while Jonas was a senior in high school,” Kelsall recalled. “And I think that was the defining moment that we were no longer needing to argue so much. I think from that moment on we actually learned how to be friends.

“Then I had an amazing trip to see him right before his last deployment. It was just him and me and it was the very first time we had ever hung out as adults with just us, because it was always his wife or our parents or friends around.

“So it was just the two of us for three days,” Kelsall went on, “and it was a phenomenal trip. And I remember calling my mom afterward, saying, ‘We’ve been doing family vacations all wrong. We have to do one-on-one vacations; it’s so much better.”

But there was something else in those conversations, something unsettling.

“I sometimes feel like he knew something was going to happen,” remembered the sister, “because we had some very poignant conversations while I was there, conversations we had never had before.

“He talked about If anything ever happened to him. You look back on that moment and you think, ‘God, why, why did he finally decide to talk about that? After so many deployments and so many years and he finally felt so compelled to say the things that he did.

“I kept telling him, ‘I don’t want to hear this, just come home.’”

The aftermath

It took almost three weeks for the military to return Jonas Kelsall’s body to his family for burial.

“They had to identify all of the remains with DNA testing,” his sister said, “and there were 38 people on that helicopter. So it took a long time.”

Normal sleep was not an option.

“Not at all, Kelsall