Milam Byers

And so we know, we weren't supposed to find out that way, but she had already known for probably two, three hours at that point, they had knocked on her door

and she just couldn't wait anymore because she knew my parents were unreachable.

The army had already visited Jared and I's apartment here in Nashville and we weren't home.

Like literally nobody in our immediate family was where they were supposed to be.

It was this wild string of events.

And so the army basically tells her, we only try two places and like, that's it.

The protocol is like, yeah, we didn't... They weren't home.

Yeah.

So that's it.

So they're begging her not to tell us by phone, but she eventually just like, I have to call his brothers.

Yeah.

So that's how I found out.

I'll go into kind of everything that I would learn later.

I didn't know much at that point, obviously.

I just knew that we had lost him.

And probably the...

The heaviest part of this is that my parents weren't landing from Tokyo for another six hours after I got that phone call.

And I can't tell anybody until my mom and dad know.

But like the worst thing has happened.

And it was a lonely five or six hours.