The tradition of setting aside a particular day to honor American veterans extends back to the end of the First World War, which ostensibly concluded at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Then dubbed “Armistice Day,” it was an occasion to honor the veterans of that great conflict. In 1954, because the War to End All Wars didn’t, Congress amended the commemoration by changing “armistice” to “veterans” to honor all military personnel who have worn the uniform of the nation, whether in war or peace.
Veterans Day, of course, is just one of three major national holidays honoring American military personnel. Correctly distinguishing between them is important, if sometimes confusing. Definitions help. Per US Code, a “veteran” is one who served in the US military and was subsequently released on conditions other than dishonorable. The past tense is important. Armed Forces Day, probably the least well known of our martial holidays, honors those who are currently serving. Memorial Day, as the name ought to imply, is for remembering those Americans who gave their lives while serving the nation. Though Veterans Day carries a dimension of this memorial component in that it officially honors all veterans, whether living or dead, in practice the day is largely devoted to thanking living Americans for their previous US military service.
So, on this day, Americans of all faiths or none take a moment to remember that the many live under debt to the few. While the “few” we honor today are not specifically the fallen, everyone who has put on the cloth of the nation knows that in the performance of their duty they may be called to give that last full measure. If we’re right to believe there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend, then, clearly, the willingness to do so is not far off. Veterans Day, therefore, is an opportunity to fulfill, in a modest way, the obligation to pause, recognize, and reflect upon the fact that we are a free people free to enjoy the fruits of a free society because since the birth of our nation, some men and some women have willingly stood on freedom’s wall and fought and killed and risked death to keep us safe. In response to such service, gratitude is appropriate. To give to each what is owed to them is nothing less than a question of justice.
On this Veteran’s Day, with potentially large-scale fights threatening on the horizon, I want to suggest that one way to celebrate and to properly remember our nation’s veterans is to not only look backwards in gratitude and memory but forward as well. It would be naïve and irrationally idealistic to hope that there are no new veterans to be made in America. Because our adversaries always have a vote, there will always be someone left to fight.
It is seemingly clear that while we will do everything that ought to be done to avoid such fights, the future fights that threaten us are the kinds of fights we haven’t fought for some time. The past twenty-plus years of war against terror and insurgency will likely give way to peer-level fights against far more powerful enemies. In the past, responsibility for kinetic effects in war—responsibility for killing people and breaking things—was largely confined to a few warfighting communities within the military. The peer-fights ahead will see this responsibility far more widely distributed across our nation’s air, sea, land, undersea, space, and cyberspace warfighting communities. While there is work to be done in many of these communities to get them battle ready, there is little reason to doubt that should war prove unavoidable these communities will be ready to fight and win this nation’s fights by closing with and destroy those who mean us harm.
But there another community in America that is likely presently unprepared for what might be ahead of us. For far too long, the American civilians have been able to outsource the defense of our nation to those few among us who enlist or commission. The concern we show for our nation’s veterans on holidays like today is proved hypocrisy if we are not concerned for our veterans on other days as well—including those days “left of boom” that precede conflict as well as those days that follow conflict—when tomorrow’s newly-made veterans come home.
Abraham Lincoln knew that there must be a pact forged between our nation’s military and civilian communities. While the solider—to include, of course, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians—is responsible to “bravely bear his country’s cause” at the pointy-end of the spear, the American civilian is responsible to care “for his brother in the field” and to serve “as he best can, the same cause.” Lincoln is exactly correct. While likely few Americans are conscious of it, there is an implied oath that America citizens take as American citizens. This is revealed in the naturalization oath that new American citizens take when they become citizens. In essential elements, it is almost identical to the oath our fighting men and women take when they enlist and commission:
“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”
That new citizens overtly take this oath to become citizens implies that all Americans have taken this oath at least tacitly. It simply helps define what it means to be an American citizen. On the relationship between this oath of citizenship and citizen responsibility to our fighting men and women before, during, and after deployment there is much to say. This has much to do not only with how we expect—and prepare—our warfighters to fight our fights but also with the kinds of fights we expect them to fight. It may well be that America has to spend the lives our warfighters, but America must never waste them. This essay, of course, has nowhere near the space to make even a dent in what citizen responsibility to our warfighters fully entails. But I want to touch on one thing. And I will start to do so by turning to one of America’s greatest veterans.
On June 15th, 1941, Gen. George Marshall delivered the commencement address at Trinity College, in Hartford. The great man drew a parallel between the role of Trinity College and that of the United States Army, both which provide in their own manner patriotic service to the nation. Trinity accomplished this, in part, by attending not simply to the technical academic preparation of its students but to the spiritual needs required of them to be participatory citizens of good character in distressing and unpredictable times. Of the Trinity student, Marshall noted, “Their period of development here not only vitalized the faculties of their minds but also aroused and intensified those latent forces of the soul that the ordinary educational process sometimes fails to reach.” In his own martial universe, the general noted, the word “soul” would be replaced with “morale”.
Akin to the vocation of the university, Marshall continued, the War Department of the United States had an obvious and perhaps not-so-obvious dual concern. Instead of a University’s production of scholars, the War Department might easily be thought to be concerned only with the “development and perfection of … a war machine.” One thinks mainly of “the production of bombers, of pursuit ships, of tanks, howitzers, rifles and shells.” But, the General insisted, underlying “the essentially material and industrial effort is the realization that the primary instrument of warfare is the fighting man.” He continued:
So we progress from the machine to the man, and much of our time and thought and effort is concentrated on the disposition and the temper and the spirit of the men we have mobilized; and we get back to the word “morale.”…Today war, total war…is a long drawn out and intricately planned business, and the longer it continues the heavier are the demands on the character of the men engaged in it…The Soldier’s heart, the soldier’s spirit, the soldier’s soul, are everything. Unless the soldier’s soul sustains him, he cannot be relied on and will fail himself and his commander and his country in the end.
The effort to prevent this failure is not a martial task alone. Those public institutions charged with the moral formation of those young people from whom future warfighters are drawn—schools, faith communities, families, and the like—must take up their role as well.
One way to do this, one way that this journal has striven since its inception to do this, is to reinvigorate in the minds of the men and women who fight our wars—and in the minds of the boys and girls who will grow into the men and women who fight them—the West’s moral philosophical and theological riches—drawn from our classical and Hebraic inheritance—that remind us that there are times when it is right to fight and ways to rightly fight those fights that are right to fight. Further, because this is true, there is nothing immoral about fighting such fights. It is essential, for what lies ahead, that our nation’s warfighters know that the martial vocation is a noble calling that can be completely commensurate with the most deeply held moral commitments commanded by the God of creation. Providence understands that this is both a force protection mechanism and a combat multiplier. It puts steel in the spines of our warfighters and shields their souls with Kevlar so that they can navigate the morally bruising battlefield without becoming morally injured.
A good place to see this strategy in action is in Providence-friend Rebeccah Heinrichs’ recent Duty to Deter: American Nuclear Deterrence and the Just War Tradition, Heinrich’s moral and strategic defense of the nuclear triad. One reason Heinrichs wrote the book, she tells us, is to fortify “the consciences of those policymakers, military strategists, and operators charged with the responsibility to design and carry out plans for deterrence and to protect and prevail in a war if deterrence fails.” By grounding her defense of deterrence in the classic just war tradition—and its presumption for justice—Heinrichs’ gives those responsible for our nuclear triad the moral confidence of knowing that the just maintenance and deployment of that triad does not violate moral duties but instead manifests these duties to champion justice.
Heinrichs goes on to demonstrate how such confidence both protects our forces and makes them more successful in carrying out their assigned missions. First, conveying doubts and a shaky political resolve about the morality of our nuclear arsenal can undermine our ability to successfully deter our adversaries. Further, moral errors in how we think about deterrence can lead to policymakers making unnecessary concessions in our deterrence posture, thereby inviting aggression from adversary nations who share few of our moral scruples. Secondly, and critically important to the day, moral confidence in our nuclear deterrent is essential in a Western cultural milieu that is increasingly uncertain about the morality of force. Heinrichs’ book provides moral philosophical and theological resources to give our warfighters the confidence that they can carry out their warfighting duties while remaining faithful to theological convictions.
Much of this depends, of course, on getting those theological convictions right. This, too, has been the work of Providence. Because our warfighters will not get such theological or moral philosophical reflection in boot camp, they need to get it now. Before the first shots are fired. We cannot adequately be concerned for our veterans when they return home from conflict if we have not properly prepared them to go into it.
The Western classical and Hebraic patrimony has much to commend to our nations present and future veterans. If I may be forgiven for refereeing to a Frenchmen in my closing statement, a confident moral grounding is the perfect complement to our brave and intrepid warriors. Because, as Michel de Montaigne, the great philosopher of the French renaissance, put it: “Valor is stability, not of legs and arms but of courage and the soul.”
To all our nation’s veterans: Thank you for your service. And welcome home.
