Joe Nail is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar earning an MBA and a masters in international policy at Stanford.

For most students, Memorial Day is simply a three-day weekend: time to rest, travel and be with family and friends. That time is a genuine gift, and worth enjoying. It is also worth remembering why we have the day off in the first place. Americans died first securing, and then defending, the freedoms that make a weekend like this possible. Memorial Day is set aside for them: the men and women who did not come home.

Major Christopher “Tripp” Zanetis was one of them. A 2017 graduate of Stanford Law School (SLS), he was a pilot, an FDNY firefighter and a lawyer. At Stanford, he co-led the law school’s veterans organization. In March 2018, the helicopter he was flying went down in western Iraq during a mission against ISIS. He passed at the age of 37. He is one of 486 service-members affiliated with Stanford whose names are inscribed inside Memorial Auditorium: 486 people who sat in our classrooms and crossed our campus before we did.

This year, the Stanford America Club, in partnership with several campus organizations and with sponsorship from Spartan, is organizing a 24-hour Memorial Day Relay. From sundown Sunday to sundown Monday, the Cobb Track will never be empty. Participants will walk, jog, or run 15-minute slots in an unbroken relay, with a collective goal of 100 miles over the 24 hours, covered one lap at a time. Any pace is welcome. We walk and run through the night deliberately, in honor of those who have stood watch and defended us at every hour.

Stanford students have chosen to remember the cost of war and honor the lives of those who died serving our country before. Memorial Auditorium was built in 1937 to commemorate the students and faculty who died in World War I, funded primarily through student contributions. For those students, honoring the fallen meant giving something up. The relay continues that idea, asking not for money, but instead a few minutes of your time.

The relay, of course, is just one way to mark the day. If you talk to many of the veterans on campus who have served, they will have stories of friends and loved ones they lost defending our country. So whether it is taking a slot in the relay, going inside Memorial Auditorium to read the names, or asking the veteran in your class about their service and those they served with, I would encourage everyone to do their part to honor those who made the rest of our weekend — and our time at Stanford — possible.