Posted on 05/27/2002 6:52:30 AM PDT by IronJack
Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. -- It is altogether fitting and proper that a man lay down his life for his country.
We all know – moreso since the horrors of Sept. 11 – that the United States military is our nation’s guardian, the faceless phalanx that walks the wall and protects our way of life. When that way of life is threatened and damaged, as it was in the skies that day, even amid the cries of anguish and anger is heard a clarion call to arms. Ordinary men and women turn from their well-worn lives to heed that call. A bookkeeper may take up a rifle, and a salesman don a flight suit, and once again, America’s sons and sisters go off to war, as they have since liberty became an idea worth dying for.
Now American blood is spilled once again on foreign soil. This time, the theater is new – American forces have never deployed to Afghanistan before. But the summons to duty is as old as Joshua’s trumpet, and the sacrifice of warriors knows no age. They give up home, security, comfort, and sometimes their very future to interpose their fragile flesh between an idea and its enemy. Often, the duty demands payment in full, and the hero returns to a much more somber parade, and a final resting place where earth finally absolves him of the duty honor imparts.
In other cases, the soldier returns from the battlefield, but the battlefield never leaves the soldier. Some scar permanently alters his vision; he no longer shares the sights and sounds and colors of the common world. In his ears ring the blasts that tore his friends from him. In his eyes are shades of the wounds and the chaos, the dead and the doomed, ghosts of good men and bad who fell within his sight. The effort of life seems a tawdry waste, a trivial insult to the intensity of purpose he and his comrades felt during the grim days when they fought for their lives. As the bombs and shells alter the landscape of the battlefield, so the experience forever alters the landscape of his mind, and his thoughts stray back to the campfire, the salt spray, the cloud-shrouded airstrip and the instant his life changed.
But not every veteran is a combat soldier. Some got the chance to serve in the rare times when men weren’t killing each other, when American military presence was represented by reputation, and by the recent memory of our successes, before the memories faded and evil got brave again. And some, even in a combat theater, never got within shouting distance of the front, spending their days at supply depots, muster stations, hospitals, or motor pools instead. They made sure the trucks rolled, the helicopters flew, the ordnance was armed and loaded, the troops had ammo and blankets and mosquito repellant. And they waited with dread as load after load of chopped up youths were delivered to their makeshift surgeries.
They were part of an ugly, creaking, often perplexing and always demanding machine. It was mother, father, home, and country to squads and battalions and wings.
And, like a stern parent, “the service” changed these people as well. In many cases, it knocked the sass out of smartaleck punks who thought the world owed them something. Many a street brawler tried to buffalo his Drill Instructor, to find out that that stocky little sergeant could throw him over the fence and never break a sweat. And many a whiny mama’s boy discovered that his DI didn’t feel any moral obligation to make the world a fair and even place to live. As those civilian illusions were stripped away by the absurdities of endless physical training and mindless discipline, a new reality emerged, one in which the tough guy and the whiner became part of something larger than themselves. Like a serpent shedding its skin, they came through Basic and AIT with a new-found sense of pride in themselves, their unit, and their country. They’d savored the communion of the brutal. They had accomplished things they never thought they could. And they were both enlarged and diminished by the process.
They realized that alone they were capable of much more than they had believed. But together, united with others similarly empowered, they became not just a unit, not just an army, but a fighting force. In many cases, their later lives reflected that same commonality of purpose, that same acknowledgement of unity. They tend to be impatient with selfish, myopic people because they’ve seen the power of selflessness and the wisdom that comes with vision. They know the feats attainable when the individual lends his strength to the wheel and all the horses pull in the same direction. In short, they know that there is might in groups, but that might derives from the willing sacrifice of the individual. The whole exceeds the sum of the parts.
In short, they become Americans. Because that was the founding principle behind our republic, that each individual should yield up a tiny measure of liberty to the collective, thereby strengthening both. It is not the fascism that demands the death of the individual in favor of the collective, nor is it the socialism that pretends all men are equal. It is a realistic acknowledgment that sometimes the strong will carry the weak, but that the weak are as responsible for their destinies as the strong are for theirs. It is a guarantee that when the hour comes round, each man will give what he has to defend his brother because his brother will do the same for him. And it is the certainty that that willing sacrifice builds a wall no evil can long penetrate.
It is a paradox: collective acts of individual triumph.
That, then, is our Armed Services. It is America in miniature – demanding, frustrating, cumbersome, even anachronistic at times. Full of contradictions, absurdities, red tape, and rigmarole. Yet, in its darkest hour, a splendid example of man’s ascendant spirit, the greater love that no man hath.
I prefer Patton's version.
redrock
Not if Patton was right about being a reincarnated Roman Legionaire!
LOL!!
And so we do.
But there are many who served in a non-combat era, or in support roles and never saw combat. They deserve our support, our admiration, and our gratitude as well.
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