It is Veterans Day, 2023. Today I thought about the ways I have tried to create meaning for myself, in the military, and as a veteran outside it. This gets at the root of why some veterans appreciate being thanked for their service, and others don’t; why some veterans want to be acknowledged and appear in public to speak, while others would prefer to observe the occasion quietly. The U.S. has its rules and laws, and its official definition of Veterans Day, but the thing is as different for the combat veteran of Vietnam as it is for the veteran whose service consisted of performing administrative tasks in Germany during the Global War on Terror. And everyone who served deserves some consideration for having done so. It is not a simple or trivial task.

THE BIG STORY

On Veterans Day, 2023

The military is a hierarchical institution, and that can affect how people think about their service.

Between my first tour, with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and my second tour, with the 10th Mountain Division, I got curious. Most — as in half — of the lieutenants who’d deployed went out for Selection, hoping to join up with Special Forces. Many of those were hoping to join the Rangers but some weird window of eligibility had quietly closed while we were deployed and no lieutenant or junior captain was eligible.

This deployment, my first, was one in which many awards were handed out, and many brave deeds done. It inspired people to go further, to get closer to the place where war was happening — real war, the kind you read about in books. Not the thankless patrolling in mountain villages that had consumed so much of our deployment, the driving down dusty riverbeds and across scrub. No, folks had gotten a taste and wanted the kind of thing we’d seen in videos or heard or seen from a distance when the SEALs or Delta or the Rangers came to our area of operations, or when we travelled to Shkin, a small outpost south of our base manned by Green Berets and CIA paramilitary officers.

The question that formed inside me was not a wanting to know what that would be like, so much as a curiosity about what it was I was trying to accomplish or prove. What kind of man was I, and what did I want to become? Should I go out for Special Forces? Everything I’d read about SF suggested I’d be well suited for it (this was very much NOT the case with the Rangers, an organization for which I’d have been very badly suited). But little of what I read jibed with what I saw SF doing in Afghanistan.

So I thought deeply and carefully about what drove me. I’ve never been motivated by money or wealth — on the contrary, I’m most comfortable in a small and orderly room with few possessions, a bed, a few sets of clothes, some books. The good opinion of my peers, though — that’s something I value — not fame, but a good reputation among those with the knowledge and context to judge my performance. And the military made it clear to me through dozens of conversations with peers that there was value to going into the world of Special Operations.

If I’d left it there, I might have headed out with the other officers for Selection. I was in pretty good shape, having done cardio and weight training at 8200 feet of elevation for the better part of 15 months (~14, considering leave, which if you are a veteran of a 15 month deployment in Afghanistan jumping from helicopter to helicopter to and from a distant post, you must). But I kept wondering — what was it that I was after? What did I want? Where would joining Special Forces lead me?

Assuming (as I did) that I’d make it through Selection, and then the Q Course, and make my way to an A Team, what then? Do SF for a while and then try to get to Delta? From Delta to one of the Task Forces with names that shift every few years? Keep looking for better groups and better missions, in search of what, exactly? What was the mission that I was undertaking?

At that moment sitting at a desk in Vicenza, Italy, in 2008, I envisioned a man on a mountain. This military version of Zarathustra was in his 60s and had made his way through the military starting with combat in Vietnam as a young man. He’d been on every top secret mission in the 1980s. He’d jumped into Iraq and Afghanistan, done raids he could never acknowledge, and been awarded everything short of those medals that required Congressional approval. Nobody had more or better stories than him. This was the top dog.

I tried to envision him, on that mountain, having dedicated his life to service to the point that it no longer truly belonged to him any more. I imagined trying to be him — because there can only truly be one of him, in any age — and accepted that this path did not much interest me.

You need to be obsessed with becoming that person to have a chance at some day being him.

There was another appealing possibility: command a line rifle company. This is what I set out to do, and ultimately what I did. I’d joined the military aware of the military’s history, and my family’s part in that history (a small part, serving as soldiers or junior officers in the Army in all conflicts save Vietnam), and letting go of the idea that I would cover myself in glory was not a difficult choice. Instead, I conceived of myself as a citizen soldier — doing my duty perhaps in the same general manner (accounting for radical differences in culture and privilege) that citizens of Rome or Athens had, and in so doing, helping carry forward the torch of democracy for another generation.

This is a very long and circuitous way of coming to the point, which is that it is easy to see a Medal of Honor or Trident and think to oneself that another person’s service means more than your own, as a veteran; the military is a hierarchical institution, it ranks and sorts people, and puts them on pedestals. In the military, your rank and schools and awards are who you are.

As a veteran, though, those things are who you were, and part (important or not) of who you are; they don’t define you. Even if you would like them to! It doesn’t work outside the military, it makes no sense to civilians!

This is a blessing and a curse — if you’ve done brave deeds, you’d like people to know about them, not in a selfish or self-aggrandizing way, but because the military is unlike the civilian world, and it’s easy to be misunderstood.

One of the best portrayals of the thorny problems faced by veterans — how to explain one’s service, how to describe the mixture of competition and loyalty that accompanies each act — is to be seen in the written description we get from Julius Caesar of two centurions. Caesar writes about these men, rivals, in the same unit, who strive to overtake one another in acts of glory and renown. In one passage, the first centurion races forward to attack the enemy, and is himself surrounded; the second centurion races to his aid, and the two fend off their attackers. Their names? Lucius Vorenus and Pullo. You may know the names from their appearances in Rome’s HBO series, which takes poetic liberties with the men’s stories.

That contradictory combination of striving for personal glory and an instinct for self-sacrifice does not exist within everyone in the military, and is not what Veterans Day is about. Veterans Day is as much for the coward as it is the hero, it is for the general and the soldier. It is a day to think about the struggle you, the civilian, would face if placed in that environment — and a small expression of gratitude to those who have given some portion of their youth to that cause.

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